Pipes are not temp files, they’re more like kernel buffers associated with no file. When I think of temp file, I think of something that is at least associated

Pipes are not temp files, they’re more like kernel buffers associated with no file. When I think of temp file, I think of something that is at least associated with a filesystem. The reason that running a binary needs a file is because execve() takes a path as an argument. But, as you said, there are other ways to load code into memory.