I think "back in the day" is the theme here. Most respondents appear old enough to remember the evolution of the tech, whereas newbies and the general public only see the "finished product". They probably just throw out older gear on the assumption that it's failed, whereas it's only been outmoded.

God knows how many "hard disk failures" have resulted in perfectly good HDDs being tossed on seeing the BSOD, when it was only Windoze overwriting its swap space and corrupting other files.

As an aside, I've been setting up a new machine that won't install the current Debian 10 because its hardware list is dated 2010, believe it or not! Have found that some distros work fine (MXLinux, Puppy surprizingly) but others just hang during installation. The easiest and most comforting solution I've found is Slackware.

Comme ca change, plus la meme chose.

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tekk, personally I wouldn't bother with dvds. They're passé, like serial ports, obsolete. It's just we don't know it yet.
New laptops don't usually have a dvd drive. On a full dvd drive, you get 4.7G; the smallest usb drive you can get is 8G sdcards go to ~500G. The software still has them in, because the code is there. That's all.

You can pass a usb drive around a house or an office and everyone can get stuff from it. Not so a dvd. Much less a blu-ray.

Plus, since they aren't being used much anymore, they are high priced. I used to buy a 100 spindle of them for $16 and free shipping from an online warehouse store with egg in the name. Last time I looked they were $35-$40. And the companies stopped manufacturing them, so the ones in the warehouses just might be old ones that have been stored for years. I though that RiData was still making them.

Little 2TB usb hard drives can be had for $50 here. They were cheaper before the pandemic. When things get back to normal they should go back down in price. And as you say, way more convenient.