To be frank I am a 30 year old and had to think hard to remember how to burn a cd, and even then. I remember that you just picked the option to burn a cd lol. Remember when you actually needed 2 cd rom drives because images weren't a thing.
If you wanted to duplicate a CD you'd use a second drive. What I normally did though was rip music to MP3 then write 100 song mix tapes. Before I could play MP3s in the car I did CD to CD copies :)
It wasn't that images weren't available, it was that 700MB was too much for the amount of storage we had. If you had the storage you could write an image
I'm about the same age as you and images were a thing. The space of your hdd was probably the limiting factor. I remember ripping and burning DVDs for friends in middle school but it was a juggling act of storage space on an 80 GB HDD