Yes, the airbag light can be triggered by things like restoring power to the car while any airbag components are disconnected. I do that all the time when going in for my quarterly door panel removal and repair of the latest breakage.

The light was on when I bought the car about 4 years ago and I bought a special purpose ~$20 tool off eBay that does nothing else other than resetting the airbag light on BMWs. Works great, and I have not needed to fund a research project into a more advanced diagnostic tool. Since it does only one thing, there's not much to learn and not much to go wrong.

So I'd recommend doing the same thing. If you need more advanced features, then yes, a more powerful general purpose tool will definitely have those, at a cost.

Also (not sure about this) my understanding is that the airbag system is still functional, even with the light on, in a case like this where there is not really anything wrong and it just needs a reset of the warning light.

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2001 X5 3.0i, 203k miles, AT, owned since 2014