Etcher was a nice simple application, but now it's an attention grabbing adware monster. I don't need any promotions when I'm burning my SD cards, thank you very much. I'm surprised that so many people here chose to defend it.
Source code is a crown jewel for an IoT device, and they have opened a door for potential exploitation and exfiltration right where the sausage gets made. This tool has absolutely no business talking to the network for any reason, but now it downloads and displayed ads from potential third party sources (that the user cannot fully control and probably does want to not trust). What an unimaginably bad security decision. And they expect us to trust them with an IoT infrastructure?
As a direct consequence of this strategy, I have started to actively steer my IoT customers away from their offering, because I feel this move demonstrated that their stack should not be trusted.