To speed up working with slow hardware and for overall convenience, we’re now also offering binary packages for download and direct installation! For most architectures, this is limited to the core system and weekly updates - not so for amd64 and arm64 however. There we’ve got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker. Gentoo stable, updated daily. Enjoy! And read on for more details!
To be fair USB sticks and SD cards seem to fail when you stare at them a bit too intensely. I think it has been at least a decade since I bought a USB stick for OS installations that lasted for more than three installs (each a few months apart at least since the need does not arise that often).
Ok, i usually go for speedy ones, a bit more expensive, maybe they have better chips.
I once read, some higher quality USB sticks even have SSD style wear leveling. While cheap sticks have the worst quality flash (good q for SSD, medium for SD an ‘barely usable’ for sticks).