You can’t make a usb bootable without root access iirc. If you already have a bootable usb like ventoy then you can load any goofy thing you want into it without root access and it’ll work.
Please don't continue to recommend Ventoy. It has serious and unanswered security questions hanging over it, and the developer seems to be completely AWOL.
I wasn’t completely convinced by that since I build it from source and the binary blobs match their checksums. Months between releases isn’t out of the ordinary for some projects too…
Regardless, what is an alternative that works the same way?
Truthfully just am not an experienced enough user to understand all the potential risks of having it enabled although I'm figuring out now that pretty much every distro I've used until now had root by using sudo.
That makes sense, it's good to be weary. Root access is needed for higher privilege tasks and flashing an image to a USB is one of them, best practice is to use sudo so that you are only using root for the actions you need it for, whilst still being logged in as a normal user.
You would get a UAC check in Windows trying to flash an image to a USB, which is elevating your privilege temporarily to administrator.
If you are just starting out with Linux then have fun, the most rewarding part is figuring stuff out like this so you know for next time!