I can’t agree with your assertion that “tape is inferior in every way to hard disks”. Tape is cheaper per TB than HDD; why put data on more expensive media if you don’t have to. Tape is also more reliable by orders of magnitude than disk. You are more likely to be eaten by a shark than suffer an unrecoverable error using LTO-8. Tape is more durable and portable than disk. It also requires no power at rest and can be used to create an air gap to thwart cyber attack and malware. Finally, tape areal densities for tape are increasing far more quickly than for disk due to superparamagnetism, which makes tape far better suited to storing archive data in the IoT era of Big Data. Tape is less ideal if you have very stringent RTO or an application that needs fast random access to first byte. But in most cases, for its core strength of longer term data archiving, tape is better than disk or cloud (although as you note, the irony is that tape underpins major cloud vendor archive tiers). Don’t be absolutist; use the right storage, for the right purpose, at the right tape.