>>Why DVD? At the time I was reinstalling stuff and switching to linux (also when I got a little Acer laptop for bedroom reading, from which I removed W10 the first day), I kept booting from a flash drive. Faster, easier and more space than a DVD, and doesn't have a mechanism which can get dirty, stuck etc.
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>>That being said, I still have about 40 blank writable CDs. Because I bought an old van from 2001 which plays mp3 CDs :). It's french. Mind you, I couldn't find a mp3 disk player in the US until 2003, and for the car I never (i.e. until 2010) saw one, allegedly the technology wasn't ripe yet. Yet the French were serially putting them into their vans in 2001.
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>Nice to have one as a "just-in-case" measure -- you might still come across "off-the-shelf" software that is on optical media, so it's handy to have around. I also happen to have a library of stuff on CD-ROM and DVD-ROM that I'd like to be able to utilize (e.g. magazine collections like FoxPro Advisor, Dr Dobb's Journal, etc. archive of files off sites like Simtel 20, etc.). Also comes in handy in situations when you might want to rip audio of audio CDs.

That's fine and dandy to have. It's the OS installation process which I simply wouldn't do from an optical drive, it's too slow. Most of the time (i.e. last ten years) I had those downloaded anyway - either as a freebie from linux sites, or from the team's MSDN repository. So putting the .iso on a bootable flash drive has saved me oodles of time, specially when something went south (didn't happen with linuxes, but did, many times, with windowses).