>Now you have to figure out how to get that key into the image, an image you may or may not control I'd say this is a good thing, initial secret distribution i

>Now you have to figure out how to get that key into the image, an image you may or may not control I'd say this is a good thing, initial secret distribution is an unavoidable complexity and avoiding it leads to "admin/admin" logins which get hacked within seconds of internet access. There is plenty of tooling developed for this, even when setting up a VPS or flashing a Raspberry PI you can put a public key on the device to be active on first boot.