Scripting user account creation and group assignment

I have to create a large number of users for a large number of Ubuntu VMs and wrote the following script as a result. This (working) bash script creates multiple sudo users from the USERS array and password field. I have been researching in other threads and across the adduser manual whether or not my process of creating a user, changing the password, and then adding the user to the sudo group is excessively verbose or not. I am aware that there are some other issues such as not validating usernames against the NAME_REGEX, and that at initialization all users will have the same password, but for my purposes this is currently not a concern. Simply put, am I doing this the most efficient way?

#! /bin/bash

USERS=(<users removed>)
password=<password removed>

if [ $EUID -ne 0 ]; then
    echo  "Please run this script with sudo or as root."
    exit 1
fi

for user in ${USERS[*],,}; do
    id -u $user &>/dev/null
    if [ $? -eq 1 ]; then
        adduser --quiet --gecos "" --disabled-password $user
        chpasswd <<< "$user:$password"
        usermod -aG sudo $user
        echo "created sudo user $user successfully..."
    else
        echo "$user already exists, skipping..."

    fi
done