Just like floppies got their bad reputation from the throw-away disks and drives which hit the market in the latter days of their era the same is true for writeable CDs and DVDs. I have tons of older Kodak Gold CD-Rs which are still perfectly readable after ~30 years. I bought these back then to use as archive medium - back when 650 MB still seemed like quite a lot of data - and can only conclude I made the right choice.
Yep, circa 1995 a "normal" hard disk was 300 to 500 MB, a whole disk image would fit on a CD, we had an external CDRW drive (yes, parallel interface), soon after 1 GB to 2.1 GB become common, and I remember making multiple "data" partitions around 650 MB in size because contents of one such partition would surely fit on a backup CD.
The CD's (media) in those times were surely more durable, but also the actual drives were much more robust.
I still have somewhere a (SCSI) CDRW drive using one of those "caddies" that can read at 1x that could sometimes read old CD's that more modern drives failed at (used to, it's a lot of time I don't use it).
