Average person? Probably not many. But it’s also not some expensive, rare, hard to have thing. I have several raspberry pi’s that could easily serve the purpose by just not connecting a new image to a network.
Yeah the cheapest way, too bad the rpi 4/5 and future versions make it possible to write to the eeprom. Atleast it sounds like the newer ones have a way to make it write protected via a jumper or something.
Sure, but I mean the chances of someone creating a virus specifically to run when plugged into a pi running pi OS or other Linux os with the purpose of attacking the eeprom, delivered by dropping usb sticks in public is so ridiculously small it has to be functionally non existent.