USB devices don't provide their own drivers. Your methods for infection are either filesystem exploits, or changing the firmware of the drive to send invalid/exploitative USB traffic.
Not so fast - many "exotic" devices (3G/LTE modems, some HID controllers, older U3 USB sticks, even some medical devices!) ship "virtual" USB CD-ROM drives with software and drivers.
... None of these auto install on macosx or Linux, and even not on windows since win7sp1 if I am not mistaken. So, no, this cannot be the reason for the symptoms listed by dragos
I don't think windows has ever automatically installed drivers. It would automatically run a program as the current user, but again that's only for CD drives, virtual or not, and nothing stops you from supplying your own drivers for the hardware.
But you can always additionally simulate a keyboard. I've heard unconfirmed statements about some devices actually going that route to install their driver and/or associated crapware.
Wow. And still worse, the device can, due to timing attacks or just plain characteristics in the device requests also determine the likely platform of the host (BIOS, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X,...) and thus react on the content.
And if you don't exactly hit the conditions the malware is supposed to expose itself, you have no way to read out the EEPROM inside the flash controller. The data chips maybe, but the controller chip of a USB stick is an entirely different thing.
