People lost their minds over how much easier and better they were than all the other stuff - burning CD's, floppy drives, zip disks, LS120 etc. You couldn't email large files and WeTransfer didn't exist. We couldn't get them in fast enough for the users where I worked at the time.
Uh? I had to install drivers to make them work. So I could not just bring one with me and assume I'd be able to read it wherever I went.
(I boot it a few times a year, mostly to show younger colleagues that whining about how terribly dated the PS4 is now that the PS5 is (somewhat) available won't get them much sympathy from someone who played games on the C64 in the mid-eighties...)
So, at least one data point for a carelessly stored floppy from a name brand still doing what it is expected to more than a third of a century later!
Most flash drives which seemingly randomly failed were of the cheap tradeshow variety.
There is something satisfying about the mechanical chunk when they the disk snaps in though.
Never underestimate the power of a Tesla Electric Truck carrying 4 tons of 32TB USB sticks barreling down the highway from San Francisco to Los Angeles.
Still beats the fastest bandwidth of the latest satellite laser LAN.