I suspect that many people associate durability with electronic media simply because it becomes obsolete so rapidly that we don't experience it in the same way. We don't know whether that dusty floppy disk or CD-R is readable since we disposed of our last computer with a drive, or we associate the failure of a flash drive with a cheap drive rather than the intrinsic properties of the media, or we attribute it to abuse. We rarely have the opportunity to use something until it is worn out, or pick it up after a quarter century in storage.

Modern media is incredibly fragile. The chief advantage it has (in terms of longevity) is its digital nature, in our ability to reproduce it exactly. Yet that is only an advantage if we actively maintain our archives.