My bluetooth device self reports whether it requires pairing or not, so I can ultimately just check that once I'm connected but I was curious how this is typically handled

I haven't worked with the OS pair dialog. We've always scanned for advertisements and connected via that mechanism, so I'm not super familiar with the pairing dialog. If that isn't bonding, then let me know and I can look into it further why it may be misreporting connection state.

So, as of right now, this does not seem to be bonding. I'm about to read the BLE spec for this device but bonding seems to be a permanent exchange of keys, which it doesn't seem like this device does unless the OS is obfuscating it away. Instead, this device seems to only require pairing, which does pop a dialog that doesn't require that you enter a key. However, if you don't click Pair on the dialog, you can't establish a connection to the bluetooth device's limited functionality. So, this device lets you do some things in open mode (prior to pairing) like get the mac address but won't let you write to characteristics, for example. So, State.Connected disregards the paired dialog and reports connected, which might not even be fundamentally wrong

I take back everything I said after speaking with the firmware team. They use pairing and bonding interchangeably but the auth mode actually is "bond" in the firmware. So, you're right it is bonding

Interestingly, the OS isn't asking me to type in anything in the Pair dialog, which is part of what confused me