I talk about the AVR Curiosity Nanos in the blog post, the integrated programmer on those makes things a lot easier, and they are about £15, so cheap enough to integrate into a development board or small run project. You can probably get clones for $1 from Ali Express, but I try to avoid that.
Things like that drastically reduce the risk of just “having a go” - £15 is not a massive loss if you don’t enjoy it.
Or if you let the smoke out. Back when people were moving from film to digital photography we talked about it a lot in that context - fear of being seen wasting money stops people experimenting and "failure" becomes a bigger risk
Yes - it makes it low risk. If you’re potentially destroying a really expensive programmer, you’re going to think (at least) before committing to buying one.