LTO-9 drives are expensive, but the media is around $90 for an 18TB (pre-compression) tape. That’s a pretty good price if you make lots of backups for work. They also offer append-only mode, which is awesome for archives where you want it to be essentially impossible to delete a backup without physical access.
But the tape itself has a great reputation for being physically robust. There are fewer parts to break than in an HDD, too. If your tape drive dies, you can replace it and keep using the same media. That’d be like having hard drive platters you could swap into another HDD later on.