Problem with flash drive recognition on MacBook Pro M3 (Mac OS Sonoma 14.5)

Type MSDOS FAT-12 is extremely limited in size.

ExFAT is what is generally used. exFAT supports much larger file size and drive size.

set your View to "show all Devices"

select the DEVICE by its immutable, manufacturer-given Device-name and ERASE again.

The Linux boot disks are typically made from a read-only CD image file. This makes the volume a read-only volume on the USB stick. Plus macOS does not understand any of the Linux file systems so generally they will not be mountable on macOS. You cannot even mount the original .iso image file for the same reason.

@Grant has the solution since Disk Utility now defaults to a volume only view when you need to see the physical drives. Sometimes even erasing the whole physical drive may not work with Disk Utility in macOS because of the .iso raw image being written to the drive. If that happens, then you will either need to use Windows or Linux to re-partition & format the drive, or use the command line to write zeroes to the beginning of the drive in order to destroy the partition table so that Disk Utility is able to properly erase the drive.