In the 90s I used to DJ Goa trance off DAT tapes. It was just a thing that was done in that genre. Later on I started producing music and all the masters were recorded into DATs (usually live playing full midi orchestration). A couple month ago I sent my old Sony TCD7 DAT recorder to be fixed. It was in storage for so long that the inner moving parts were stuck solid. Yesterday I discovered that in 2025 SPDIF to USB is a thing, so as I'm writing this, my DAT player is connected to my PC recording all the music I had on DATs into FLAC files. DAT was indeed (and still is) a wonderful medium.