On the left side of a typical Linux hobbyist experience graph you probably have "this is a disk image file, and this is a disk, I'll just copy the disk image file onto the disk!", then you have a period of "I'll use the cool dd tool (without oflag=direct and/or sync because by this point you know people use it but you don't know why people use it) like I saw on the internet!", then when you understand that everything is a file you have "this is a disk image file, and this is a disk, I'll just copy the disk image file onto the disk!" again.

I personally suggest recommending people the Disks application included with Ubuntu Desktop and Fedora/Centos Workstation. It shows icons representing internal disks, SD cards or flash drives so they know what device they want to work with. If they want to take their time they can see all the information about the drives and partitions, they can start discovering and asking questions and reading up on how computers use disks right from there if they want to. And if they don't want to, it's just extra confirmations that it's the correct disk or DVD that they want to put their image onto. Then when they're sure about the device they can create a disk image and restore a disk image in that same application!