forgive me. i am struggling with this stuff as well.
Feel free to make any question you want. There are no stupid questions.
could someone just install btc core on an airgapped device. launch core. create a new wallet. create a "receive address" and the from an exchange or other hot wallet send btc to that receive address?
Well, yes, but my question is why would you want to do that? Bitcoin Core is not newbie friendly, and does not support a seed phrase standard like
BIP39 (which helps
a lot for backups). Instead, I would follow
this little guide and install Tails which come with Electrum pre-installed.
would this not be a cold wallet? then that person could make back up copies of the wallet.dat file for redundancy/protection?
It would be a cold storage, but you should not rely on digital back ups, as disk corruption is a common phenomenon. Instead, you should be able to back up your bitcoin in paper, human-readable. That's a seed phrase.