SmollestLight: While MY REWARDS requires connecting to your GOG account via GOG GALAXY it no longer requires an internet connection after the successful login. The in-game items received are purely cosmetic and in no way affect the single player experience of the game.
"It's just cosmetic" is not a legitimate excuse for there to be DRMed content as part of the game. And they (cosmetic things) absolutely affect the play experience, single-player or not. Else we wouldn't have had decades of cosmetics as rewards for single-player experiences, and we wouldn't have online services like Fortnight generating billions of dollars purely on cosmetics.
"The game has only placeholder textures, no sound, and all character models are a simple wireframe cube until you activate online" is also just cosmetic. Once there is ANY DRM, there's no exercise that can draw the line between acceptability and not. It's a binary thing. Cyberpunk 2077 has DRM.
There's no way to draw a line in between. There's no way to defend the "my rewards" program. It's 100% pure unadulturated DRM.
Once again, please stop trying to gaslight your customers. Instead, take this up with management to get the problem actually fixed.
EDIT: So I repeat -- it's no surprise that the premier game that highlights DRM on GOG (though not the only) also brings a 100% online-only account-based external service resold key to the product catalog.