I just did this for the motherboard on my desktop PC (thanks Intel and your CPU update!) and it requires a clean boot device of some kind to boot into UEFI. It has nothing to do with the OS of the device.
In my case, yeah, I did it from a thumb drive, but I could see making a boot CD that has the bios files on it as well.
OTOH if you have the capability of burning and booting a boot CD it’s probably way easier to just use a thumb drive.
One thing I’ll note, on my motherboard, only using the keyboard to navigate the UEFI menu failed to update. :( I had to connect a physical mouse to run the menus.