Ugh, new tools are way safer though.

Ugh, I know that feeling. My advice is to just lean into it for a week. Let your brain make those notes, say the art critic stuff out loud, and really lean into the overthinking. In my experience, doing that on purpose makes it feel less serious and more silly. After a few days, it stops feeling like a deep thought and starts feeling like a dumb habit you can laugh at. Your mileage may vary, but it helped me break the cycle.

Hey, didn't I read somewhere that some places use a boot server for stuff like this? Like you set up one machine to send a wipe command over the network to a whole room of laptops at once. I mean, you'd need them all on and plugged into ethernet, but it could maybe do dozens in one shot instead of six. Sounds like it needs more setup time though. For 300 old laptops, maybe the two weeks wasn't even that bad.