My barking brakes

Any constant beeping when you're breaking like the thing beeping at you the whole time you're going down the road until something happens and it's not the accumulator coming to pressures what's happening.? Yeah it's time for an actuator there's no way around that or you just keep driving I drove for a year almost like this with the brakes of an old '60s Dodge truck with no booster and four-wheel drums lol car drove fine gas mileage was good breaking was terrible breaking is the least of my issues.

 

Iirc, changing the fluid can sometimes help, but it’s no guarantee

 

The usual way "air" bubbles get into a brake system is from somebody opening it up and doing work. If nobody has been doing that, then the bubbles you're hearing are probably nitrogen bubbles, escaped from a leaky accumulator. That causes all the same mischief as unbled air in a brake system, plus also causing the pump to run more often because of the loss of nitrogen from the accumulator (the same way the well pump runs more often in a house with a water well, if there's too little air in the house's pressure tank).

Going through the full bleed procedure will get the bubbles out and probably make your brakes quieter and safer for a time, but will not stop the problem coming back and the pump runs getting more and more frequent. Sooner or later you gotta replace that thing.

Regrettably, there is no old school brake bleeding of a gen 2. There are passages in the actuator closed off by valves that have to be opened to get all the air out; the bleed procedure using the ECU is what does that.

If you have trouble getting Techstream to work, there are other scan tools able to trigger the brake bleed procedures. There is a thread reviewing some choices; some strong recommendations emerged if you join it about here.

The "why worry? it'll just always brake like an old truck without power assist" line is an ok description of the way the system's fail-safe mode is designed to work—but there's a big unless involved, when you have enough unbled bubbles in the system.

With enough bubbles in there, if it goes into fail-safe it's going to stop just like an old truck with unbled brakes—meaning it keeps going.

So if it is barking like there are big bubbles in there, and you're not going to replace it right away, then definitely I would at least bleed the system ASAP, using Techstream or another scan tool that can do that.