> How many of us here who frequent these forums are guilty of being irresponsible with digital waste/footprint when it comes to things like this?

Did you consider used market? I was stupid enough to not take the opportunity to make some good money when even ancient ones were unobtanium and overpriced everywhere, but recently managed to sell all my older ones at a decent price, so no direct waste was produced.

What concerns me more about this Pico however is the signed boot locking feature that if not reversible could lock a Pico to the original program forever, so an used one couldn't be repurposed for anything else even if a non malicious user wanted to reflash it entirely without reading the original content. I'm not sure about that so I'd welcome more information on the subject: could signed boot locking be reversed with a complete flash erase?