Balena Etcher is great for imaging rpi as well.

It is not. hundred+ MB electron app, instead Rufus being few hundreds of KB and around 10x more flexible in corner cases.

I really despise BE from engineering perspective.

It never occurred to me to judge a flashing tool based on its internal architecture and language/framework choice.

I judge it based on whether I get a bootable bit of flash out the other side.

Rufus is just straight-up better, though? It's smaller, faster, more configurable, doesn't require installation, doesn't opt you in to analytics (wtf are they even analyzing?), and doesn't advertise the developer's other projects.

Even ignoring those last two, which just seem gross, running an entire web browser to accomplish the same thing as a 1MB native application is like using an anvil as a hammer. Yeah, it'll work, but why?

I don’t know if it’s better; it seems like it could easily be as good, but I’ll check it out the first time Etcher fails to make a working flash drive.

Besides that, every single of maybe a few dozen times i tried it, it said checksum error after verification. On different systems, with different media. Interestingly there were no errors in reality. I dismissed it as a well meaning toy for dummies. Or maybe data gathering spyware.

Thouroughly unimpressed with it and any project recommending or even insisting on using it.

Rufus has made multiple unbootable drives in the years that I've used it. Etcher has yet to made one and I used to flash drives constantly - multiple daily - until I switched to Ventoy which is the way forward now.