Bed leveled yet still inconsistent first layers? Let's check the filament extrusion tensioner.

I just ended up returning my unit and having them ship me another one. One word of advice by the units off of Amazon you get better customer service. The moment that I left a bad review customer service showed up out of nowhere and gave me top level customer service

Had a similar issue with my Sovol SV07+ printer. It was feeding out of a dryer box causing extra tension on the filament. Would print fine on the overhead spool holder, but had issues when i tried running filament directly from the dryer. Going to try running a PTFE tube from the dryer to the print head and hopefully that'll fix the feed issue for me 😅 I'll report back (if I remember to lol) with an update after trying the fix

your videos are great- im in a similar boat, but i have another strange issue which is print quality gets a little rough in a predictable way i.e. when i print a timing pulley, the north east face gets a little messed up. im wondering if there is something about how the head is bending the tube that causes underextrusion only in certain ways. as for the e step calibration, is there a way to just insert custom g-code at the beginning? i know anycubic doesnt make the initial estep param known but maybe there is some way of discovering it.

On the K2 max you can't configure e-steps because KobraOS is locked out, you can only change the extrusion rate in Cura. They configured marlin in for relative extrusion instead of calculating the actual e-steps because they don't test their printers before they ship them. Point: Changing extrusion rate to 99% in cura HUGELY helped without under-extrusion.