That makes sense, it’s good to be weary. Root access is needed for higher privilege tasks and flashing an image to a USB is one of them, best practice is to use sudo so that you are only using root for the actions you need it for, whilst still being logged in as a normal user.

You would get a UAC check in Windows trying to flash an image to a USB, which is elevating your privilege temporarily to administrator.

If you are just starting out with Linux then have fun, the most rewarding part is figuring stuff out like this so you know for next time!

Using dd or another third party flashing tool usually requires root to flash to usb.

Hope you find an answer, it would also be great to see the context of why you need to do it without root.

I would use something like cloudflare pages or an Azure static web app. Its free and serverless you just update your site with github or similar.

Any screwdriver works if you try hard enough and don’t care about the screws afterwards.

Source: I opened up one of these with several wrong screwdrivers over the course of several hours.

I would have a look at your encryption mode on cloudflare, it could be set so that its trying to force https.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/origin-configuration/ssl-modes/