I am shocked by this - the quote in below is very concerning:
"However, in 2024, the situation changed: balenaEtcher started sharing the file name of the image and the model of the USB stick with the Balena company and possibly with third parties."
Can always use dd but I always go stupid when I need to set boot flags and all that crap, which is so much easier with etcher. I think I've done dd with gparted in the past.
i think it depends on the image you get - for archlinux you can simply cat (or dd) the file onto a usb stick and it works perfectly fine, bootable. but i think i have seen an image at some point where it didn't work, but i don't recall what it was.
It won't depend. I think it's because back in the day we never had an easy way to force boot a device, if a device wasn't flagged as bootable it wouldn't boot