I should qualify that – I don’t know for sure whether and which distros enable updates to run non-interactively. fwupd has the ability to do so and it’s billed as doing so on its github page, but that doesn’t mean that a distro has to actually take advantage of that. Could be that in a default configuration on a given distro, it only updates stuff next time you invoke it.

The only reason I’d guess that it might not run automatically is that some devices do not deal well with power loss during firmware updates, and I can imagine that a distro – which has no way of knowing when a user might start flipping power switches – might want more-conservative settings. Might be something like the last bit of distro installation, but they might not want to run during normal operation.

But yeah, I bet that Louis Rossman didn’t think of that either when he was talking about using USB connectivity to prevent firmware updates.

EDIT: I also vaguely remember reading something claiming that smart TVs from some manufacturer that are not connected to the Internet were using nearby smart TVs of the same brand and within WiFI range that can reach the Internet for Internet connectivity. Ordinarily, I’d say that that’s not generally an issue for most devices, but printers often do have wireless networking capability, so probably one more at least theoretical vector via which a printer might potentially reach the Internet. I have not read any claims of a printer doing this, though. I also don’t know whether-or-not those claims for the smart TVs were legitimate, but they are technically-possible to do, so…shrugs