yeah one typo in the command can destroy your disk 
I can’t deny it always works. . .
The flip side. . . it also always works.
I prefer a GUI, because as you said, one slip, and you’ve made yourself a very long day.
of=/dev/sdb
oops. It was sdc. . . .
this happens more often than you think.
We have to be very careful when using dd
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Yeah…In not experienced hands it’s a bit like rm -rf used on you know what 
Just be aware that it is a powerful tool and that with great power comes great responsibility. If you are careful, nothing bad can happen. 
If you are a wuss and scared of accidentally pressing enter, prepare the command in a text editor, double check it, and paste it into the terminal.
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In my opinion etcher is okay because at least it works. I have never ever had a failure of it not booting on any linux distro. Can’t say that for Ventoy or Rufus. We have many instances where a user can’t install and first thing i ask is how did they create the live usb. Most times it’s Ventoy or Rufus and that is the reason.
I’m not scared of using dd and use it pretty often. But I can’t recommend it to most users because of the inherent risk.
Etcher has two of my biggest gripes with soyftware in the current year:
- Bloat – it contains the entire chromium browser in it. Millions of millions of lines of code for just drawing a simple UI. It’s about 3000 times bigger than
dd. - Connects to the internet when there is no need to and it is spyware.
It’s definitely not okay.
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I have an alias that helps me not to make a fool of myself:
alias hyb='echo "sudo dd if= of=/dev/sdc bs=8M"&&lsblk'I back space the “sdc” to correct usb. It list my inserted usb, so I know which to use.
Popsicle or Fedora media writer (which also works on windows and Mac) are both pretty decent options outside of a terminal. Slightly more bloat. Alot more GUI 
Popsicle is pretty good, at least for a GUI tool.
I use etcher-bin and it’s okay. On Windows etcher is easy and it works. No failures when trying to boot on EndeavourOS. That’s the only reason i recommend it. If the user has EndeavourOS installed i wouldn’t recommend etcher. It would be popsicle.
dd works on windoze, too. And if you make a mistake and it destroys you windoze partition, that’s a plus in my book. 
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I don’t hardly ever use dd. I didn’t know it worked on Windows. 
So it works in if you open a cmd prompt with admin? Or you need a utility that is dd which is an .exe?
It’s dd.exe. Most of the GNU utilities have their windoze counterparts.
Mount ISO, copy contents to FAT 32, label partition or mod grub.cfg, reboot.
To answer the first part, I use a USB then do a net install so I don’t have to do an immediate updates.
I guess you could use DVDs if you really wanted to, but i just use balena etcher and a usb stick. Etcher is pretty easy and straightforward to use and gets the job done. Also, these days, I’d imagine that it’s much easier to find a usb stick than a DVD.