> Somewhere, a LLM is trained on this code as we speak :)

Had a similar thought when I saw

  dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1M count=1

I came up with this one on my own many many years ago. Exact order and bs=1M and everything. I taught it that :)

Though I usually do the individual partitions before the main disk, to make sure fdisk doesn't complain about existing signatures as I start making partitions again. These days many disks and SD cards support "blkdiscard" to just wipe the whole thing (and temporarily gain some performance from clearing internal info), and "wipefs" became a thing to wipe the exact sequences fdisk and mkfs look for.

The "dd" method makes most sense on BIOS systems where you want to make sure to wipe the MBR boot code, and know that nothing is accidentally being preserved when you install your preferred bootloader.