Just wanted to add something for future reference of anyone reading your post: after Canonical did this, LXD was forked by Linux Containers into a new project named Incus.

Ugh, balenaetcher messed with my USB pen drive so that I had to jump through hoops to make it usable again. Based on web searches, this was not uncommon at that time. I haven’t had issues with ventoy so far. However, maybe I’ll just go back to Rufus.