Really I would have concur with the author if dealing again and again with a need to fit the media contents into 650MB (if it is intended to be put at real ISO) or to guarantee how combination of 1) realmode bootloader + 2) UEFI bootloader + 3) ISO-only thunk + 4) UDF volume bizarrely interlace in a single byte stream.

Bootloaders are dodgy even without such a complication. Freeing oneself from all this may give just a moral sense of deliverance...

You're not limited to 650MB provided you use UDF rather than ISO 9660. UDF supports up to 16 EiB. It's still a "real" ISO, but obviously you'd need to stay within DVD size limits to use physical media.

Windows has been multi-GB bootable ISOs for over a decade at this point.

> You're not limited to 650MB provided you use UDF rather than ISO 9660.

You donʼt take into account case of booting real ISO on an old hardware. If it doesnʼt know DVD, chance of UDF support in BIOS is vague. More so, itʼs possible to barge in to a system without "no-emulation" support so the real boot part will be limited to 2880M due to floppy emulation.

Yep, all this is very old. UDF and no-emulation support appeared circa 2000. Bootable USB sticks appeared appoximately the same couple of years. En mass, these systems had been gone circa 2010. (Iʼm even slightly confused I still remember all these barriers, among with CHS addressing, geometry translation, etc.) So each boot media creator has to select what part of this legacy is to be supported... or drop it at all and orient only to a common base for last ~10 years.

Windows shipped on DVDs. I'm not sure why you made your comment. Of course a system must support it, and plenty of ~20 year old systems did.