Does that laptop use the new USB4 driver? Then it will show the USB4 menu under Devices > USB that replaces TB Control Center with a far more detailed output.
(That Anker USB4 device is actually not even recognized at all by TB Control Center, even though it works, on certified TB4 devices, because it is a pure USB4 device without any TB support. So nobody should even want that crappy old and useless piece of software)
Microsoft mandates the USB4 driver be used for devices supporting it (CPU-integrated USB4 controller) and launching with Win11.
Most devices that launched with Win10 seem to still use the old way of doing it. And depending on the manufacturer the device may not include proper firmware to switch to the USB4 driver once upgraded to Win11. A Dell Inspiron device with Tiger Lake CPU I have access to is doing exactly this. Although Tiger Lake clearly also supported the new USB4 drivers, as at least Framework was using it.
I have not yet found a device that uses the USB4 drivers where you can still use the TB Control Center, but I do not know it that is impossible.
The TB Control Center has nothing to do with whether TB devices can trip Bitlocker or not.
TB4 already mandates that the old security levels no longer apply. TB4 hosts must support IOMMU-based security, that works from boot, hence TB connections are supposed to be established at boot-time already and no longer require you to manually approve them from TB Control Center as a hacky workaround to prevent various attacks from TB devices.
What trips Bitlocker on default settings, is that some PCIe devices have BootROMs (like GPUs in order to add drivers to the BIOS for video output during the early boot process, before the OS takes over with its own drivers). Bitlocker by default configures the TPM to measure all code that executes and ties the Bitlocker encryption key etc. to the exact measurement it was setup with.
Adding or removing any PCIe device with a BootROM, like a network card with PXE support will trip this, as it changes what code executes before Windows takes over.
Dell devices, like my own Dell XPS have a BIOS option, that by default prevents the BIOS from executing any BootROMs behind TB. While this option is off, you cannot use a eGPU during boot, PXE boot from a network card behind TB etc. As the OS has its own drivers and notebooks have their own screen to use until then, this impacts barely anyone and is a smart BIOS option to have, that I wish FW would also add.
Booting any BootROM that is signed for SecureBoot can also be a security issue, since some Linux distributions are also signed for that and can probably be abused to bypass those restrictions.
Bitlocker itself can only be configured to ignore the executed code measurement entirely, in which case the TPM would basically tell any OS from any external media you boot your secret disk encryption key. Windows or any driver has no control over what the BIOS has the TPM measure as part of “executed code”.
