Limitation​s & assumption​s in CD burning

I tried to burn a single 400MB (or so) file to CD, and it got stuck for hours partway through. Is there a file size limit in the burning process? It was a blank CD, and I asked to have it treated like as USB stick when prompted, which I seem to recall was similar to UDF packet writing. In case it matters (I suspect it doesn't), it was a zip file of selected parts of a file tree.

After cutting up the coaster & disposing of it, I tried again, but this time, I descended to selected nodes in the subtree and zipped selected sub-subtrees (i.e., nodes in the subtree that I zipped up above), then got rid of the sub-subtree for which I had created a zip file. It seemed to work fine this time. However, when I ejected the CD, Windows said to wait while it closed the session so that it could be used in other computers. Hopefully, that doesn't mean finalizing the disc, i.e., I can still write (overwriting some files if desired) as if it was a USB stick.

P.S. From a quick google, I didn't come across a mention of some file size limit that people were running into.

It was a write-once. Faster to write, and more reliable longevity. Surprising to find a bad CD these days, they're so quality controlled. Thanks for clarifying the distinction between closing the sesion and finalizing the disc. And I do see that opening large zip files can be slow, especially from CD. Hopefully, this is sufficiently mitigated by my only zipping up sub-trees within the file tree.