Getting persistence to work is a giant PITA lol I was doing it for work once and kept having problems. We used RUFUS, a Windows-only tool to make the drives. Making a new drive required Windows to format it, then Linux to copy the files, before it was usable. What a dumb process. I didn't use block-level imaging because I wanted to add new files easily or expand them to different drive sizes easily or something.
It's like crypto: you wouldnt attract anyone paying nearly enough if you had to invest to solve current problems without any idea if you even could. Might as well re-solve inefficiently past problems and you might catch a few passer bys.