If your comfortable doing small repairs on your own then take it apart and clean any affected areas with 90% IPA or higher using a cotton swab. This will dry within a few seconds and you can reassemble. I’d also take this time to update or create a backup of your files.

My opinion is broadly generalized but considering iOS demographics they would be more easily affected by a social engineering attempt to gain access to the device to install the RAT although I don’t have any evidence to support this that’s not anecdotal. If you can get the phone unlocked you can sideload whatever you want on it. Doing this remotely would be the main hurdle. You would need physical access to the device at least once to set it up. Or get the user to set it up unknowingly. With the amount of steps involved I doubt it would be something someone will just accidentally click on or that you could install without knowing the credentials to the device. Apple has multiple steps in place to prevent accidental installation of apps and even then you’d need to know how to cover your tracks or it would be easily found on the device. Even routine features like battery and network usage could potentially disclose the presence of a RAT on the device. Apple does a great job at product security partly due to the fact that they will pay large sums of money for verified exploits. If you happen to find one get in contact with their security team. You might just be the next big payout.

TL:DR - Your teachers right it’s nearly impossible. I would also add easily found, and easily removed.

What I suggest isn’t for the faint of heart, but if you’re using a power line adapter and you can’t move it to another plug you could switch the wires in the breaker box to a breaker of the same amperage but on the same phase as the one in the other room. You need to have a firm understanding of your electrical panel though. More than likely they are on a different leg in the breaker box.

Depends on the laptop and type of drive. Spinning disk drives can be “wiped” with DBAN or similar programs although you don’t see these much on modern laptops. Windows can be reinstalled afterwards using the same activation key as used previously. (Even better, hopefully it’s stored in the BIOS/UEFI) SSDs can be cheaply replaced and the old drive can be physically burned. If it’s eMMC storage I would just burn the whole laptop and cut my losses. Everyone has a different risk tolerance level though so that plays a factor too. Also, it would depend on how difficult it is to access the drive, if you can do it yourself, and how much profit there is involved by selling it after potentialy buying a replacement and/or paying to have the drive swapped out. Tons of variables here. Hope you find the answer you’re looking for OP.

Can you link a picture for us OP? Depending on what the password is for there’s ways around it.

Reboot Restore RX