23H2 brought a refreshed Push Button Reset and a new Windows Backup app. Both write hardware metadata into recovery zones — a new fingerprinting surface.
Microsoft also added Windows Hello Cloud Sync, which encrypts and uploads your hardware profile to the cloud. After a reset, all your Hello settings, including hardware bindings, restore automatically.
For HWID change this means: a basic local profile rewrite is no longer enough — you also need to detach and re-link the cloud profile. We do this automatically in HWIDChanger v3.0+.
Old backups (v2.x format) remain readable but don't include the new cloud-profile metadata. After upgrading to v3.0, run "Backup → Migrate to v3 format" once to get full coverage.