The "Ventoy Update" post looks rather suspicious to me. The dev didn't respond to the GitHub issue, so this might just be some jackass pretending to be the dev.
But independently of that, the BLOBs are even more suspicious...
Not strictly necessary, but being able to carry all my ISOs on a single USB key saves me from having to redo the whole USB Stick Writer thingy every time. Is there another tool out there that does this and makes it easy for the plebs like myself?
It's solving a real problem in a niche case. Someone called it gimmicky, but it's actually just a good tool currently produced by an unknown quantity. Hopefully it'll be sorted or someone else takes up the reigns and creates an alternative that works perfectly for all my different isos.
For the average home punter maybe even up to home lab enthusiast, probably not saving much time. For me it's on my keyring and I use it to reload proxmox hosts, Nutanix hosts, individual Ubuntu vms running ROS Noetic and not to mention reimaging for test devices. Probably a thrice weekly thing.
So yeah, cumulatively it's saving me a lot of time and just in trivialising a process.
If this was a spanner I'd just go Sidchrome or kingchrome instead of my Stanley. But it's a bit niche so I don't know what else allows for such simple multi iso boot. Always open to options.
I stopped using Ventoy. I don't trust the OSs installed by means of it, sadly. Also, lost any hope of a clarification on the issue. Yes, you should not use it for the time being.
I understand how this could be a prime target of a supply chain attack and that things are a bit fishy. On the other hand people are waaaay less picky about installing other binary blobs on their machines. I wish paranoia would be more general :)
I will still use it for testing things, but I will no longer use it for installing the OS on a PC I'm going to use until they get the BLOB issue sorted out.