But just you then just buy a worthless piece of plastic nowadays, because the license key was already added to Steam, GoG or whatever?

I honestly don’t get the obsession with physical media. That’s a thing of the past, my PC doesn’t even have a drive anymore.

The only benefit I see is a reduced download size, but with day one patches sometimes being 40+ GB that’s also not always the case.

It’s not like you own the game, just because you have a physical copy of it. Once the licensing servers are shut down that disk becomes a paper weight, and that is if it doesn’t require a constant connection to begin with.

On the other side you could argue that it’s better for the environment if we finally get rid of all disks. Is it a huge impact compared to everything else? Probably not, but it is a step in the right direction.