@catto
At some point they've added recovery from the Internet.
I can in theory make a image of bootable recovery flash drive with dd — not much, but at least that would enable you to restore a .dmg image (presumably downloaded to another flash drive) to the third flash drive. You have to have at least 3 USB ports though 😂
@catto
Check if it has Internet recovery option though — try booting with Option key pressed and see if there is such an option, there use to be possible to connect to a wireless network from this EFI shell even, I'm just not sure if its present on your particular MBP.
Or… keep using Linux indeed — might make more sense than using no longer supported release of Mac OS X, I use Void on my still (barely) alive 17" MBP, it's one hell of a machine!