I certainly wouldn't mind returning to a world where inexpensive, easily-labelled optical disks could hold relatively large amounts of data.
When HDDs were generally no more than a few gigabytes, I could basically stick a compressed backup of my PC on 1-2 CDs, write a date on them, and shove them in a box. It was incredibly convenient and offered good peace of mind. In fact, I just recently recovered some important data from the late 90s off one such CD.
I've never seen a serious study on the subject (at least not in English), only anecdata, so I've never been sure how much veracity to assign to claims of the commonality of CD-R degradation. It wouldn't surprise me if 90s-era discs were higher quality, though -- for my own anecdata, I've had only one batch of CD-Rs ever show evidence of degradation, and it was one of the last I ever bought and seriously used in the early 2000s.
I've never seen a problem with DVD-Rs, but I didn't use nearly as many of those. I haven't written new optical disks for practically anything other than OS installation media since ~2003/2004, and in the last few years I've rarely even done that.
(And I never made the hop to BD-R. From a data storage perspective, I found it pretty much obsolete on arrival.)
My anecdote re. BD-R: I got the Verbatim "good" discs (made in Taiwan, good dye technology - sorry I forgot the specifics) a while ago and used them to backup data (that fortunately had backups to other places as well). Months later, tried to read them. No dice. I was shocked as I thought BD-R's were built more robustly than DVD+-R's. BTW, this is true of all 3 discs that I tried, albeit they came from the same 50-pack.
Indeed it would be wonderful, but exactly how viable this technique is remains to be seen.
Back when I started using CD burners a typical big hard drive was far smaller than a single CD. (A CD burner was usually hooked up to a dedicated Mac -- always a Mac -- with an unusually large and expensive external hard drive.) If this technology becomes available within, say, five years, it should still be far further ahead of our 4TB SSDs for a good 12 years (assuming Moore's Law in both cases, which is probably optimistic for SSDs). For comparison, CD-Rs probably stopped being useful for backups about fifteen years after I started using them in 1992 (by 2007 it would be a one large or a few small projects on one CD).
It would be interesting to see how difficult it would be to have micro-cd drives, where a disc had a housing, just like an old floppy; but about the sized of an SD card... Super cheap, super dense, and ideally protected better than current CDs...
When HDDs were generally no more than a few gigabytes, I could basically stick a compressed backup of my PC on 1-2 CDs, write a date on them, and shove them in a box. It was incredibly convenient and offered good peace of mind. In fact, I just recently recovered some important data from the late 90s off one such CD.