I used mine 3 days ago. Admittedly, it had probably been a few years since the last time that tray opened, but all was good!

I have two that are constantly hooked up to my mac! One for ripping and burning CDs and DVDs (which I still do regularly, in fact I ripped five audio CDs just today) and one for ripping/burning 4k/blu-ray. I occasionally use both at the same time to make copies of discs, but my need for that is for part of a hobby project.

Not sure about the minority now, but you will be in a few years if not already. Prebuilt PCs haven’t included optical drives as standard for years now, and good luck buying a new laptop that has one.

Optical media isn’t dead but it’s on life support and will become functionally obsolete in the next decade, same as what happened to magnetic media.

My pc sonetimes doesn’t start up, i assume the psu is wonky or something stupid like a wonky power button connector. I started to look into it and was shocked when i saw that my pc has a optical drive hidden behind a little hatch. I completely forgot about that. But also shows how much i need it.

I got an external Blu Ray drive. It’s pretty sweet

I have one as well in my PC of Theseus, it’s been an ongoing part for more than a decade now. But, I also haven’t used in in a year or more.
It’s kinda funny to think back at how excited I was when my father first installed a CD-ROM drive in our home PC and knowing I could now get some of the newest games which were coming out on PC at that time. And now, I don’t even know if my optical drive is still working.

I got an internal BDXL drive and flashed firmware to make sure I can rip the 4K discs I started getting as part of physical bundles. Still need to start getting NAS drives to be ready for when my main PC stops being my daily driver+Plex Server before I had to get a new TV that could view them (still don’t have a dedicated player and annoyed the PS4 Pro didn’t ship with 4K playback). For now I can at least hook my PC to the TV if I really want to watch a disc.