My big problem now is that there appears no way to connect the Dongle-M to my eWeLink environment. I don’t want to bind it to Home Assistant, or MQTT etc
Hi, sorry for the confusion. SONOFF Dongle Max (aka. Dongle-M) is not to be used with eWeLink App or eWeLink Cloud. It is a Zigbee/Thread adapter for Home Assistant, Zigbee2MQTT, OpenHAB, ioBroker, etc. It also works with eWeLink CUBE OS.
There is nowhere in the sales and marketing literature that states it doesn’t work within the EWeLink ecosystem so one assumes it works in a similar, yet more powerful manner than other Zigbee bridges.
The Dongle-M product page has never said it work within the eWeLink ecosystem.
But don’t worry, you can return it if you don’t want it. All SONOFF official sales channels provide money back guarantee.