You really shouldn't. I love steam, but there's no telling what will happen once Gabe is not in charge anymore

I don't get why they haven't switched to usb drives. They're cheap, and have high enough storage for today's games.

Because optical discs are slow af lol.

Blu ray caps out at around 72MBps.

A gen 4 nvme drive can hit 7500MBps. Over 100x faster

Reading from disc during run time makes no sense today.

Assuming you "own" a digital copy Playstation and Xbox will be just as secure. Well, aside from issues with forward compatibility a few generations down the line which is always less of an issue on PC.

The issue with discs is that they're expensive (shops need to keep them stocked, they need to be distributed to the shops, etc.), slow and fairly low capacity so most modern games would require multiple discs. The last one would, in addition to being annoying, severely limit game design if the game needs to be playable without copying all files over to the console's SSD for some reason.

With all that said - I can understand why people would want to be able to install from discs. Yes, discs are slow but some people's internet is even slower, especially in rural areas.