Depends on the use-case.
You're probably thinking of home use (where, if you're buying a Mac, you're probably also thinking ahead and investing into something to move its files around); or maybe university lab use.
I bet the GP, meanwhile, is thinking about (pre-university) educational use-cases. Public-school computer labs were a big part of Apple's market share from the late '80s until the early '00s.
When I was small (late '80s), we had a single Apple II per classroom. Those machines has no networking or storage, other than the 5.25" drive. Usually we weren't saving anything, just using stateless educational software/games; but every once in a while, we'd all be run through some program, which would save our work to a single shared classroom "state" floppy.
Later, we had computer labs full of Macs (Color Classic IIs, if I recall), but still no computer network — nor assigned seating in the lab — so saving data on the lab computers themselves was pointless/untenable. Instead, we were expected to bring a 3.5" floppy disk to school with us to save our work on. It was a school supply!
And that's basically how computing in schools continued to work, riiiiight up until the iMac era. Which is both when there began to be no economical data storage medium you could expect every five-year-old's parents to easily purchase as a school supply (flash drives were "pay a premium for portability" products in 1998, not the commodities they are now); and also when computer local-networking stacks began to really be standardized (no more AppleTalk, only Ethernet), lowering the barriers to schools building IT competence, and so enabling even elementary schools to start setting up computer networks, with user directories, roaming user accounts, and central file storage.
But despite now having a place to save things at school that didn't require any disks, you were suddenly put in a tough spot if you wanted to bring work home with you. If you weren't one of the rich kids with a USB stick, then email was pretty much the only solution! (Not necessarily actually sending email; I recall people opening webmail, attaching documents, and then saving the message as a Draft.)