Another benefit of having an external disk drive is that you can replace it if yours goes bad. I’m not sure what’s going to “end in tears,” it would work just like any other USB device, you plug it in and the console could load games from it.
But yeah, an all digital console makes no sense to me, unless it’s an interesting form factor like a handheld or an arcade cabinet. So the only console I have is a Switch, and everything else is on PC.