My naive assumption would be it's looking for events in time, like sign of occupancy. For example, when your phone leaves the wifi network.

But still must be a bug.

I was thinking that repeated small probes add up quicker than you'd expect. But this is ~1.1MB/sec, which still seems a few orders of magnitude off.

Now I'm left wondering what this traffic actually is - assuming probe (arp/icmp) packet size of 64 byte, that's 17kpps. I don't think an ESP32 class Internet-of-Trash chip can even do that. Even bulk transfers rather than small probes would be pushing it.

Perhaps this thing found some fellow-traveler device streaming video on a port it happened to connected to?

... the linked xit says it "broadcast 1TB of data". So maybe some protocol with a much larger packet than icmp, spammed in a hard loop without any delay?