Someone did eventually bring out a floppy-drive peripheral for the QL, but it was basically too late to save the platform. Also, iirc, you needed to be drop-dead rich to afford one.
But you're right-- it was too late to save the QL by then.
Of course, that wasn't the only problem with the machine, not by a longshot. I did my very first commercial hardware hacking in high school building/selling plug-in 'spiderboards' to protect the oh-so-fragile ZX8301 chips, and got my first oscilloscope in college to chase down all the ground bounce that was still occasionally killing the NMOS ROMs...