Connecting to OneLake vs SQL Endpoint in Desktop

So after investigating, i've come to the conclusion this is due to a PBI update and a change to how MS wants OneLake connections to be handled. I'm not sure it's the answer, so will wait for confirmation. I noticed that different people in our org were using different versions of PBI, and the new behaviour seems to be that OneLake connections want you to write a semantic model and connect through that. We also seemed to have an issue where some users didn't have permission to read/write XLMA endpoints, which was giving an error. I think it was essentially a combination of those 2 things.

Before, i think you could connect through OneLake and bring in whatever tables you wanted and tables from other sources too. Now:

1) Get Data | LH | Connect (via OneLake) prompts you to create a model with a live connection to service (you give it a name). You select your tables from the LH and create. You then work in Power Query almost as usual. There is no Report or Data sections anymore at all though - just the modelling view

2) Your PBIX file though is essentially gone once you create the model. You can't save the pbix file itself or bring in data from other sources, do reports or anything like that - you have your model with a live connection and that's it - you're just dealing with the SM alone. It basically creates the SM straight in service instead of in desktop. 

3) It seems pretty simple from that point onwards - it's just essentially uses Desktop as an extension to write to service instead of a pbix file.

4) Once it's in service, you can pull the model into desktop and choose to connect or edit the model from there. Once you've pulled it into PBIX, you're then able to add other sources again but you'll be prompted to change the connection to Direct Query mode (perm change).

Anyway i think that's it - the new behaviour needs XLMA read/write permissions, and users using older versions of desktop will experience different behaviour. Feel free to correct me if that's not quite right.

Thanks