Less moving parts, man. Less parts to fail, easier to source if they do.
Yes, you’d THINK that and conventional gamer group think agrees...but my own personal experiences are that every flash doodad I’ve ever had over the years has eventually died and both my Saturns still play discs perfectly...so does my Gamecube, my Dreamcast, my Duo R, even my PSOne. This probably has a lot to do with quality control differences between 1990s made in Japan and whatever sweatshop shit hole they make Game Doctors in.
In fact I’ve only had two optical drives fail on me ever. One is the SuperDrive built into a 2008 unibody MacBook and the other is the OG PC Engine CDROM2 which was the first consumer CDROM ever made...croaked on me in like 2015 I think.