> ISOs make little sense over a regular disk or filesystem image for just about every use case except burning to optical media ...

Uh what!? About every single Linux distro has .iso files available.

And it typically makes way more sense to dump the .iso to a USB stick than to an optical media because it speeds up the installation big times. That's the case for Ubuntu for example.

And an example as to why optical media are kinda falling into irrelevancy: some distro like Ubuntu ship an ISO that doesn't even fit on a DVD anymore. It is an ISO meant to be dumped to a USB stick, not an optical media.

Now of course the downsize is that there is something very nice when you burn an .iso to a write-once optical media: once you've verified that the disk's cryptographic checksum is correct, you know the disk's content won't change so there's no need to recheck it (at least not for security purposes).

With USB stick that's not the case.

> I know nothing about Ventoy, though.

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