Things don't actually have purposes. That's a human invention. (Adaptations can improve the chances of spreading, so we say "it does this" or "it's for that", but it's not intentional on the part of the genes, proteins, etc.)
Anyway, about your first question, it seems there are three main ideas about how viruses originate.
It is very clearly written so individuals won't be able to buy a printer without this junk in the firmware. Afterwards maybe they can fix it, but according to the article it includes a provision that 3D printers (or CNC, etc) can't even be bought online in NY.
I switched to Smart Launcher because it was the only one I found that mentioned being able to import my Nova backup. The transfer wasn't perfect, but extremely good.
That's true, and I should have been less absolute in my language. However all of those activities were niche and actively scary sounding to the 'normies' (and to a lesser extent still are)
I actually did find "warez" on BBSs before I had Internet access. But I really think even finding BBS numbers in the back of a magazine and trying them out put me outside most computer users of the time.
Security by obscurity would have made a lot more sense before global communications allowed people to share the results of poking around like this.
Even after the Internet was invented probably 99% or more of users would have no clue about digging into the systems.
I've mentioned this before, but on one of my early contracts I found an 'encryption' function with a keyspace of 32... values. I don't mean 32-bit. The key was prepended as the first byte to the stream, and the decryption function could accept the full 8-bit range.
Fortunately that was replaced by real encryption some time before I left. But I'm pretty sure nobody actually cracked it before then, because I think nobody thought to try it.
Realizing that a mirror shows different views to different people at the same time.I think I learned a lot in kindergarten, but don't remember the other kids, or teacher, or classwork at all.
Event Horizon has a sequel in spirit: The Warhammer 40k universe. (Nevermind that 40k was first)