Yup!

Or Evri, the brand formerly known as Hermes

I started noticing it about a year and a half ago…

True… Could be useful for CCNA lab perhaps?

This model is old enough that it’s pretty easy to find firmware online, and is not recieving updates anymore.

even when they are actually static

Are they often not ‘actually’ static? In what way?

Unfortunately I believe the usb has to be created from Windows…

OpenLinux

It appears to be open source, see the other comment from OP

Have they not always had them?

Run a distro of linux which is less resource intensive than windows?

So would I - it does not seem like it would be too much of an issue, though I have seen people complaining about such things in the past…

I believe it is because it can automatically (depending on the browser) start a download…

Unfortunately, computer literacy seems surprisingly rare in the younger generations…