I would like to suggest that anyone who in the year 2024 insists on you communicating with them by fax can't be trusted and your best solution is therefore to stay away.
In general, no. Most malware that runs its own process simply uses some name intended to make you not notice it. But it is possible, in Linux just as in every other operating system that ever existed, to imagine that some unusually sophisticated malware manages to exploit some unknown vulnerability to gain full control of the kernel and then all bets are off, then it would be able to do anything.
While I don't know what exactly you mean by sysadmin, it sounds to me as if you'd be better at setting up (and maintaining) CI/CD than most normal developers and that's something that'd be very valuable to lots of projects out there.
If you don't actually have an opinion, just go with the default, ext4 really is a very good file system, but if you want to have an opinion and not go with the default, zfs is truly a fantastic file system.
ICU & CLDR is an excellent place to start for anyone who wants to help out with support for any not yet well supported script and/or language, for those libraries and that data are what a lot of other things are built upon (like Android, iOS, Windows and macOS, to take four of the largest and most well known examples).
To get in touch and offer to volunteer, sending a mail to the icu-support public mailing list can be a good starting point: https://icu.unicode.org/contacts
I would like to suggest that anyone who in the year 2024 insists on you communicating with them by fax can't be trusted and your best solution is therefore to stay away.