The OP verified that the file was not corrupted:
This is not terrible advice, but it’s not great, either. If you have a bad connection, you might have to re-download countless times over before getting a valid image.
This is good advice in general. Just like zsync (which I had mentioned above), it ensures that downloaded file is valid.
This advice is just plain wrong. Search around and/or do actual tests and you’ll find this is not the case. Check here, for example.
Outside of that, the other advice seems pretty good.
I have yet to find time to test out Balena, but I’ve heard of people having trouble with it in the past. I tend to prefer using dd although that’s kind of advanced. I wouldn’t recommend it in this case. mkusb offers a much more friendly front end to that.