Not old, either. My old desktop that I gave to my younger brother has an optical drive. Whenever I have spare money laying around to build and a place to put a desktop, it's going to have an optical drive. Not having one, at least somewhat reachable makes me anxious. I use it probably less than once a quarter, more like twice yearly, but when I need it, I need it.
Honestly, a better solution would be an open-source IODD-type device, because sometimes I still meet old devices which do boot via USB DVD drives, but not flash drives.
But Ventoy is a second solid choice, especially with newer devices, where such limitations are basically non-existent :)
Oh damn, would not have expected that to work. The worst hack I ever used is when I helped a friend install Linux who didn't have any spare (working) USB drives around. He did have a spare SSD in his PC however, so I ended up flashing the ISO to that.
⚠️ The link above might be offensive. I've deleted the post but the deletion is failing to sync across instances or something (I'm still receiving reports for it after it's been deleted)
Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files. With ventoy, you don't need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly. You can copy many files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them.
Ventoy is an OS.
It's a live Linux that boots from the USB stick you format/image with the ventoy tool. The rest of the space on the USB stick is configured to be essentially a standard USB drive.
The live Linux's sole purpose is to boot another image stored on the USB stick.
So, once you have "ventoy"d a usb stick, you can plonk gparted live iso, Ubuntu, Debian, Eos, W10, W11... whatever isos you want. When you boot from that USB stick, you get the ventoy menu screen and select the iso you want it to continue to boot.
Oh yeh, saved my skin a few times.
And you can use it like a normal USB stick once your OS is up, so you can have some installers on there to speed things up