Hi,I confirm that I have the same behavior with my work laptop that uses i915, between Linux 5.16.0-6 and 5.17.0-1. The i915 driver was not included, now it is, along with all i915 related firmware.
And it seems that the string "firmware: direct-loading" is present whatever the driver, to list which file is really needed. Even for WiFi or Bluetooth.
So I guess that this filtering could be generalized