The Difference Between Charging a Battery and Setting a Car on Fire

If you run down the charge of a battery first before attempting repairs, it's way less flammable and way less dangerous if you do any damage to it. It's literally the difference between setting a car on fire with a full tank of gas and with an empty tank of gas. So back to the original story then, clearly exploding thumb drives make for great headlines. But this surely tells us that there must be hundreds of thousands or millions of thumb drives that are just randomly plugged in to computers that people have no idea where they came from,. What's on them? That's usually the point of plugging it in, is find out what's on it, right?