>It's bizarre because you can just install off a USB stick and it's much faster but I guess that's just not what they are used to.
For installation media specifically you have to use up a USB stick entirely for the duration of its life as install media. This is true of optical media as well, but the USB stick costs way more. The installation disc you made also just sits around until you throw it out in a year or whatever.
But installation media is kind of a carefully picked example right? I mean, it's something that USB generally does better. Being able to back up valuable stuff to optical media- especially M-disc- is pretty great. USB sticks aren't suitable for any kind of longer term backup solutions- they die all the damned time. Also when I started my latest D&D campaign, I did actually hand out cheap little USB sticks with campaign documents on them, but that was a special case; I'm going to hand out discs later. Obviously discs are cheaper for this purpose, and you wouldn't have any problem handing out a hundred CDs if you wanted to.
For Blu-rays and reading and playing from them, there's some decent piracy forums that I read over when I was picking out drives for my newest mainbox, because I wanted some that could support that sort of thing, and there definitely are still plenty of great models for that. The two drives I have now are an LG WH16NS40 (which I believe has no useful piracy capability, but seemed great for burning and reading blu-rays and M-discs) and a Pioneer BDR-212V which is allegedly suited for such purposes if you flash it (I've done none of that; it was just something I wanted to have in the box for now). It doesn't support all discs before you flash it. Anyway, if you look around I'm sure you can find a way to get a drive that can reliably play all your official anime opticals, and of course you should be able to burn them too in such a way as to play elsewhere which does seem to take effort but does seem to be things people do.
Anyway, I think a machine without an optical drive is incomplete, and the fact that all the good laptops lack them means that I have to have external USB blu-ray burners, which is not the end of the world but it is certainly not ideal compared to them being inside the actual laptop.