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Last time it was a major problem, AMD had a program to send you a low end old generation processor and you'd send it back when you were done. CPUless flashing is pretty common now though, and inventory is low, so there's less stale bios motherboards out there.

If the board supports headless USB bios updates, yes. Those can update the bios without a cpu present.

When the Ryzen 3xxx series CPUs came out, some motherboards had the same situation. Some computer stores were anecdotally lending out 2xxx series Ryzen CPUs so you could update your BIOS

I had no problems upgrading from a quad-core Zen 2 to a hexa-core Zen 3 on my particular motherboard (Gigabyte A520M H).