[dfox]

The whole UF2 idea has to do with the educational background of RaspberryPi. The protocol was invented by Microsoft for use in some kind of similar educational board with the express purpose of not needing drivers, being reasonably crossplatform and crucially not needing any special permissions to access the device. The end result is that in some kind of educational setting you can use some kind of cloud/remote IDE on iPad, stick the RPi-Pico into the iPad and flash it, no blessing from Apple needed.

[seba_dos1]

Oh. So it's just a result of locked-down walled gardens being so widespread that they influence the world around them. Depressing, but thank you for pointing it out anyway; on my phone I can just run picotool itself and it's easy to forget how dystopian it all got outside of the niche I'm in.