raspberry pi 5 wifi rejected by eero: status_code=16 (and what finally fixed it)

if you ve landed here because your raspberry pi 5 refuses to connect to an eero mesh router and your logs are full of CTRL-EVENT-ASSOC-REJECT bssid=00:00:00:00:00:00 status_code=16, i spent several hours on exactly this problem. here s what i tried, what i learned, and what eventually worked — along with an honest admission that i still don t [ ]