I prefer balena etcher to this. I've had many more failures with rufus compared to etcher. etcher is also a lot faster at times.

I've been using rufus for years now and have never had any issues. Also, the size difference is huge. Rufus: 1.1mb / Balena etcher: 124mb

They both do the same thing, except one includes a copy of chrome inside it.

With telemetry as a bonus

There's also ventoy. https://ventoy.net/en/index.html

+1 for ventoy. Install it on a flash drive and copy bootable ISOs to the drive and you're done.

does anyone have a good resource on how to restore a USB flash stick back too a single partition drive?

You can use windows Disk Management. Just delete all the partitions on the flash drive, create a new one and format.