Bill D
As I see it, USB 1 was a very simple interface. In upgrading to 2.0/2.2 the capacities got larger and the process of writing to the NMOS chips got cleverer to make the internals faster or more reliable, ie redundant chips and address re-defining. Sticks these days are microprocessors in themselves.
In order to inform the PC (or radio/device) what it is doing, some information is passed which is stored on the PC or is read each time - what they call "installed". The second time it reads but you may not get the "installed" message.
My interpretation of the "information passed" includes anything akin to a DLL or executable software.

Wiki says:
Unicode ECN: Released in February 2005.
   This ECN specifies that strings are encoded using UTF-16LE. USB 2.0 specified Unicode, but did not specify the encoding.
Inter-Chip USB Supplement: Released in March 2006
    On-The-Go Supplement 1.3: Released in December 2006.
USB On-The-Go makes it possible for two USB devices to communicate with each other without requiring a separate USB host. In practice, one of the USB devices acts as a host for the other device.

all done by its internal micro-processor.
The type of encoding and some information about the manufacturer (or a stick using someone's formats) is certainly passed and retained. Hence the possibility that some receiving gizmos can't read all those differing formats.

FWIW My 512Gb tops-out at 27.7 Gb. So the price is about right for 32 Gb in red.
Interestingly there is a rather large reported used space which I would assume is the software to falsify the claimed capacity. The vendor withdrew the listing on E-Bay but re-did the same that now (now) has a disclaimer about "untested". So the original lack of such information cannot be proven by the 2500 already sold! We will see. In normal usage most people would not discover the problem for years and assume it had failed in use.
Beware, some fake devices overwrite files in order to justify the claimed capacity. On my stick the files are reported as present but effectively not there hence no thumbnail image.
my screen dumps of the problemo