📚 Burn and run usb friendly images for Ubuntu or other distro for headless systems?

I'm starting to play with a bunch of headless x86 and arm systems. The raspberry foundation has made it super easy to just burn a raspberry OS onto a usb-c stick and launch, but it's incredibly annoying to do so on x86 or with generic distros.

Do folks understand why burn and run OS images are not available for most distros? I tried using Ubuntu Cloud images, but I could not figure out the right workflow steps to get them running.

In an ideal world, I'd download a ready to go image, burn it, copy over a config file with first boot info on (basically my SSH key and wifi info) and just go. Do folks know of tools that enable this? Starting from just Windows is ideal, but WSL2 friendly works great too.

Minimal effort instructions for doing this with Ubuntu's provided cloud or server images would be super helpful also!