> That being said, cartridges were fast. The move away from cartridges was a wrong turn

Cartridges were also crazy expensive. A N64 cartridge cost about $30 to manufacture with a capacity of 8MB, whereas a PS1 CD-ROM was closer to a $1 manufacturing cost, with a capacity of 700MB. That's $3.75/MB versus $0.0014/MB - over 2600x more expensive!

Without optical media most games from the late 90s & 2000s would've been impossible to make - especially once it got to the DVD era.