I personally always have one USB stick with me that has a live usb boot of Fedoraon it, but I just saw the new video from Linus tech tips and thought about extending it a bit.
He mostly talked about windows tools, but I think I will add
I didn't realize you can have an OS ISO and other programs on the same USB stick. I thought the live boot ISO had to be the only thing on the stick (or multiple ISOs using Ventoy).
With Ventoy you can have additional files on the same partition. However Ventoy scans everything on that partition, so additional files can slow it down. I recommend creating a directory, say named "Files" and put an empty file ".ventoyignore" into it which makes Ventoy ignore that directory and all sub-directories.
Yeah I have some decently speedy USB-A 3.0 drives, they're essential to me these days. Although I've filled them with too much crap to use as a boot drive for anything lol. They're only 400MBps, but weren't expensive.
One thing I've noticed though, it ends up saturating a pair of USB ports in a lot of computers. If I have a second thing in an adjacent port, eg a mouse, things get screwy (mouse movement gets choppy or speeds throttle).