There's an argument for looking after the stuff you care about, whatever the medium.
Digital data has the advantage of being easily and flawlessly duplicated to prevent accidental loss, and takes up minimal physical space[1]. And then we go and ruin it by trusting it all to a single delicate short-lived piece of desirable-to-thieves hardware, or putting it in the hands of some short-lived internet company. And then shrug when we lose it all in an entirely predictable way.
I think the 'digital dark age' is a real problem, but it's not really because storage devices are unreliable.
[1] Which matters when your housing is overpriced and insecure, in a way that older people with sheds and attics and things don't really grok.
The digital media is certainly reliable for medium to long term storage but hands up who still has a DVD reader on their computer. How about a threeanabit drive?. Fiveanabit? That weird high capacity zoom drive? How about an 8mm tape drive? A VHS? VHSC? Etc etc. We’ve probably all got lots of Backups and archives of our treasured data, but only the most dedicated hoarder will still have the right tech available to,access it all
That problem's easily solved. You don't create digital data and put it in a shoebox under the bed on whatever storage medium happens to be fashionable at the time. You keep it on a live, actively used computer system with appropriate redundancy and backups (possibly someone else's - AKA 'the cloud' if you don't want to do all that unisex spaceadmin stuff), and migrate it as necessary when technology changes dictate a forklift upgrade. This has become *much* easier since computers reached the point where they could make use of internet technologies for file transfer.
I've got files in my current home directory that originated on a 3.5" floppy based Amiga, and/or contemporary early-90s Windows systems. I don't have to care about reading old floppies, just the file formats. (And if necessary, you can spin up an emulator.) I've no idea if the CD/Zip100/DDS4 backups I have from the early 2000s actually work, but it doesn't matter, because that data's right there on my current computer.
ob-xkcdMeanwhile, I've lost all the C64 and DOS era stuff, along with assorted dead tree and analogue recordings (photographic film, audio cassette, Hi-8, VHS) because I didn't think to rescue them when I became unwelcome in my parents' home. Over the years I've lost many files to hardware failure (mostly crap floppies, the occasional coaster or hard drive with dodgy sectors) and user error (deleting things by mistake, that time I accidentally overwrote an entire hard rive partition with some boot image, that sort of thing), and a small amount of data to malware.
I've been around long enough to know what works, and become sufficiently paranoid
[1] about backups. But sadly it seems to be the sort of thing that people only learn by experience. If they're computer-savvy enough to be able to learn it at all. There's also a scaleability problem if you're in the habit of routinely creating gigabytes of high-resolution images or video, rather than documents, images and code: Having grandchildren seems to guarantee data storage problems.
(Of course, this assumes you're storing your data in a file or bitstream on something you can reasonably manipulate. If all you have is a front-end to data on someone else's proprietary system, you're largely stuffed. I'm not sure how to easily back up all my YACF posts, for example. I suppose I could scrape My Posts with a script...)
[1] And, to be fair, well-off enough to afford that second disk or VPS or whatever.