[Cyberdemon]

This is all conjecture, but opening that hole which is normally sealed now opens up all the crap falling in the hood vent to go wherever it wants in your engine bay, which I suspect will introduce dramatically more dirt/debris since normally that stuff just rolls into the bottom of the airbox.

As mentioned, unsealing that system likely just introduces more hot air (hurting performance) and hurts airflow which I'm sure was optimized with quite a bit of CFD analysis.

So I think in the end "the car will run and be just fine, but you're hurting everything else because it looks cool." I think that goes for pretty much every aftermarket intake at this rate - hurting performance for aesthetics and louder wooshing noises from the uncontrolled airflow.

If you wanted to actually validate this, logging your IAT with and without the cover across a couple of pulls would give you a quantified answer.