Sure. I booted ventoy to test distros, but when it came time to install the final distro, I wiped ventoy and reflashed it.

Why is it "sus"? Isn't it basically a bootloader for isos?

It's not any more sus than running any FOSS project binaries obtained from github. And OP wants to test a bunch of live environments, so that's not really a security-critical environment.

I'd suggest it's collective laziness over any even potentially malicious intent. The author listed about the 180 blobs they are aware of, the vast majority from FOSS projects.

It's not for long term anything at all, it's just running a live distro to poke around.

This is why I asked my second question: what kind of things are you looking to check out or compare? That's helpful in pointing you in the right direction.

If you're unfamiliar, there is literally almost zero difference between distros aside from very tiny customizations and the underlying package management system.

You won't find some distro with massive performance gains for any average task. You also won't find a distro with some optimization that is special that can't also be applied to any other distro.

So if you find something you like about one distro, you just put that on whatever you're running (unless you're talking about package mgmt). Easy Peasy.