There are a lot of gotchas with "dd" and its command line syntax is baroque to say the least. On MacOS it's worse because it's easy/natural to write to /dev/disk2 instead of the "raw" /dev/rdisk2 and make everything dog slow.

I understand the appeal of Etcher, but it seems like such overkill to launch Chrome just to write some data to a disk. I wish Windows/MacOS shipped with good tools for this out of the box instead. Disk Utility seems to be getting less useful over time though.