dd is one of THE most common ways people accidentally wipe disks. All it takes is typing sda when you meant sdb.
The by-label trick helps a bit, but I still don't like it. Etcher exists. Etcher will give an alert when it's done flashing. Etcher will verify what it wrote. Etcher will predict how much time is remaining.
The raspi imaging utility goes even farther and gives you configuration options. There are many other special purpose flasher utilities like that.
Where dd really shines is in a script, for making empty images of a certain size. But even then... there are tools like truncate to make a sparse file instead.
The only other time I ever need the CLI is for directly creating a compressed image, but that's a somewhat uncommon task for me. And I would not be surprised if one of the GUIs had it by now.
Downloading a giant electron application which bundles Chrome and Xbox joystick drivers just to write to a flash drive feels downright criminal when there's a 200kb program that will do the same job already on your computer.
I personally use dd for such cases as well, but I don't mind downloading a "giant electron application which bundles Chrome and Xbox joystick divers" (I just downloaded Etcher and it takes 40MB on my machine) if that's what it takes to lower the risk of accidentally wiping my hard drive when I want to write an ISO to a USB drive.
Electron makes the problem of flashing totally solved. I have a 1TB SSD for exactly this reason, so I don't have to worry about what's light and what isn't.
The by-label trick helps a bit, but I still don't like it. Etcher exists. Etcher will give an alert when it's done flashing. Etcher will verify what it wrote. Etcher will predict how much time is remaining.
The raspi imaging utility goes even farther and gives you configuration options. There are many other special purpose flasher utilities like that.
Where dd really shines is in a script, for making empty images of a certain size. But even then... there are tools like truncate to make a sparse file instead.
The only other time I ever need the CLI is for directly creating a compressed image, but that's a somewhat uncommon task for me. And I would not be surprised if one of the GUIs had it by now.