Most of the tools to create a USB flash drive installer totally erase the USB flash drive. So that is why smaller 8 or 16GB flash drives are now suggested. Ubuntu has become more than 4GB, so smaller does not work at all.
Did Windows encrypt or use its fast startup setting which is hibernation which prevents writing into it?
Since larger flash drive, you may want to consider Ventoy which boots both Windows & Linux ISO directly. You just copy ISO into Ventoy’s ISO partition.
https://www.ventoy.net/en/download.html
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ventoy/files/
I have an emergency flash drive using Ventoy with many ISOs.