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?

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.