hmm have i missed anything?

Any program on your computer can just run "sudo" to escalate itself.

The problem is not the passwordless sudo but running untrusted programs on your computer under your user. They don’t need sudo to steal your SSH keys or inject malicious code in your .bashrc.

Only for your user, and it means a keylogger on the system if it gets rooted can't pull your password to try on other machines. Personally I always either login as root or use passwordless sudo.

Yubikeys are also surprisingly annoying when setup for the as well. A working developer just needs sudo a lot.

Realistically a "sudo button" would be handy, on the keyboard, with a display to show a confirmation pin for the request (probably also needs a deny button so you can try and identify weird ones).

Sounds like a good use case for that new Copilot button you see on newer keyboards.

You don't even need a button. Just a secure dialog like Windows has.

I mean, that's what you have pinentry for.