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?
Yeah when you build from source you gotta dl some blobs from busybox and some other projects. It works fine with the ones the developer claims their build is based off of, the ones whose checksums are listed in the docs and match what you get when you ask for them from the repos for the aforementioned busybox or whatever.
I haven’t pulled apart a binary release of ventoy to check and see if it actually has those documented blobs or something else.