Speaking from experience, I had an 03 Suburban & a 04 Avalanche, did the Escalade Cluster swap on both. It was plug & play and worked fine. No calibration required. Programming the mileage was the only thing for both.
Youre correct in that aspect mileage is stored in the clusters themselves. Only 05-07 Classics will require the cluster to be programmed to the vehicle or youll have a lot of error messages. My 05 Tahoe has an 04 cluster in so it has a battery light and service brake booster message on all the time
Got an Escalade cluster on my 02 but after running it I had a guy in Northern California program it to the original mileage since I still knew it by heart lmao
