BalenaEtcher has always worked great for me. Yesterday I updated to macOS 14.8 (23J21) and now it just hangs on “Starting…” after I type in my Mac password giving Etcher privileges to flash the USB drive. My guess is Apple tightened up something related to security.
Never mind, turns out it was due the USB drive being reformatted as APFS before using Etcher. My assumption it was the OS update was incorrect, reformatting to exFat before using Etcher fixed the issue.