Yeah that’s the first thing I wrote in my notes, to stay far far away from dd.
Ventoy isn’t in the Debian repos, but I did find a similar program there - Gnome multi writer. I’ve used unetbootin in the past on Ubuntu, but Debian instructions specifically say not to use a program like unetbootin for some reason. I’ll give the multi writer a shot the next time I do a fresh install, thanks for the tip!