20 cents is absurdly expensive, but much less than maintaining a printer for one paper sheet a month at most.
I was recently pleasantly surprised that the shop with a printer down the street refuses to take any USBs and only prints what you email them.
No, operating system, thou shalt not be permitted to seek and run executable code automatically on every connected storage media. I thankest thou most assuredly.
I needed some info when I was playing a video game, so I looked it up and printed out the excerpt that I needed. I could have just loaded it on my phone, but then I'd have find the page again whenever I needed it, and try to avoid all the stupid ads.
They don't accept emails? All the ones I've been to, do.
If our computers were actually able to connect with each other, we would be using phones for everything already. But they can't, and phones are so user hostile that it's not obvious that you can even read your data in any way.
The way to share data was CD-ROM. Everybody had one or two rewritable disks with random stuff on them. But you could use neither the zips nor the CDs for some stuff.
After the 100 MB, there was the 250 MB and later even came the 750 MB.
In my experience they were very handy/useful, particularly for backup use, but they were seriously troubled by the click of death issue.
USB 3 came well after 2/4/8 GB USB (2.0) sticks were common enough, USB 3.0 started becoming a common thing around 2010 or later, around 2004/2005 a common USB stick would have been 256 or 512 MB, in a couple years they quickly grew to 1/2/4/8 GB minimum.
But elsewhere in the world thumb drives are a very big deal. Like down in Mexico most car stereos will play MP3s directly off a thumb drive. So I learned you give the guy that runs the local internet cafe a few bucks, tell them what kind of music you like, and they fill it up with whatever. Likewise you can get loaded up with tv shows, movies, etc. This is a big deal for people in the very poor countryside.
That was just my experience in Mexico a decade ago, I imagine it's similar a lot of other places in the world.
Though all this cloud DJ shit is trying to change that. I hope it doesn't take
If both parties have 1 Gbps connection it will take about 20 min to move about 128 GB. But if one end has only 100 Mbps, then it is already 3,5h. If can only maintain reliably 25 Mbps, then it is already shy over 14h. So you can almost mail a thumb drive faster.
Sure, physically moving the thumb drive from one computer to another takes virtually no time - the bottleneck is getting the bits on and off the thumb drive, which can be quite slow depending on how cheap a thumb drive you happen to have lying around. I would be happy to be able to sustain 100 Mbps (12 MB/s) on transfers to/from my thumb drive!
You can get effectively NVME over USB. Now, the question is, are you using a 5 or 10mbps (or higher with TB/usb4) connection, supported cable, is there a hub in the way restricting traffic, etc.
With most computers, the front ports may or may not be the fastest ports. If there's a front panel USB C connection, that's usually your best bet, then red/yellow ports in the back... Of course, it could be an older device/interface, etc.
I kind of hope that with USB5, they standardize on labelling/cable requirements as well as reduce the "optional" bits to at least fall under one of 2-3 umbrella sets of requirements. It's a bit of a mess.
All of that said, I have nvme drives over USB that are at least as fast as a SATA connected drive, and generally much faster depending on the port used.
It's not as fast as a USB-C to USB-C cable that can do 40gbps with IP-over-thunderbolt, but good enough for most use cases.
Sometimes, it's just easier to SneakerNet that chongus mass of "the most important data ever".
My car has a usb drive with my favorite music.
At work pluggiing one into a machine would get you fired and questioned by authorities. If we have to sneakernet files it means burning them to a CD or DVD...