There’s a reason why plants are called complex interconnected organisms. If you put salt on the soil where that tree is growing, it also might reach to other plants in the area and kill them as well.

Live CDs are mostly about 1gb in size. Get a 4gb+ thumb drive just to be safe.

No problem

Yes. That would be the same as a persistent USB drive. Just plug in the external drive, run the live CD installed in your USB drive and install Linux Mint on the external drive instead.

Absolutely.

I’ll self host my own forgejo instance soon.

I agree. Instead of pseudocode, using a simple language like Python that is pretty understandable seems to be a better way of representing your idea.

T-Pose