validating the integrity of the installation

The ISO file should be validated, and many installation medias check hashes.

it can be disastrous if you don’t pay attention to what you type in

Valid point, even I get nervous when entering dd.

I don’t think that dd alone should be used as a backup

Absolutely it shouldn’t. I said primitive backups, which are not a replacement for things like snapshots. DD backups are space-inefficient, easily corruptible, and often result in broken systems.