Fair point. An they managed to get their email delivered on that newsletter announce mailing list (Which I expected to be moderated). Not sure how that could happen.
I've had tails "kill" a few USB drives. By that I mean windows wouldn't recognize the drive with explorer and I had to use diskpart to reformat it, and the drive was fine. I assume this user doesn't know that, but I think back then I just googled "windows won't see usb" and got the answer so they should get good.
Windows refuses to recognize anything except the first partition on any storage device that it classifies as "removable", so this tracks. Just zero the partition table, and Windows will offer to format it like it wants on next plug.