You don’t need a background in zero-knowledge tech to run a program on a computer that you consider trusted. zkSNARKs & zkSTARKs are non-interactive, so you don’t even need to be connected to the internet while proving. You can generate your proof or proofs offline on an air-gapped machine. You don’t even need specialized hardware.
On a more sad note, this community might not quite be what you think it is. Personally I find the state this forum has fallen into through the last couple of years fairly depressing. Take a look around, the vast majority of what you see is copy-pasted, overly verbose, ChatGPT slop (for some reason anyway). Then you get valid proposals once in a while, such as this one, and they are promptly ignored. Then Vitalik or the EF show up once in a while and all they do is announcing their research, not conducting it here. I don’t think a public Ethereum research board exists any more.