It used to be you could find a box of photos or keepsakes that you inherited to look back on how things were or when you were a kid. Now, most of that is stored on phones, and most parents probably don’t think to share or save them in a way to be passed down in the future.
I’ve been in IT professionally for longer, and I’ve seen and experienced far more flash drives and SSDs just drop dead than HDDs without warning.
This isn’t controversial btw. You can google it, ask professional backup companies, etc. Drives that depend on holding a charge, which degrades over time, are not recommended for long term storage because long term storage is a known issue with them. They’re the wrong tool for the job.
No, HDDs will not always alert to impending failure - but SSDs and flash drives never will. Which do you think is preferable, “not always” or “never”.
Also when a mechanical drive fails you can usually fix it and recover your data. With flash/ssds, again, you never can.
As for burning to discs, yeah that’s even safer - but not generally viable due to the tiny amount of data they store, and the fact that basically no one has disc drives anymore.