That's precisely why you want it in a safe.
Yes, I am very familiar with zbarimg and qrencode. But, other people might not be, and that's why just scanning a QR code works. Not everyone has Bitwarden, 1Password, Pass, keepass, etc....
And we are talking about the root account for your production AWS account. No need to get fancy. Just print the QR code, and put it in a safe hoping you never need it.
We even have these amazing things that securely share passwords or other secret data between multiple authorized users.
Seriously just scan the QR code and put it in any password manager that supports TOTP and it will start outputing codes.