If we take any portable media as the comparison, the largest I know of is 50GB for a blueray disk, that’s still something you can ‘almost’ load into 32gb of memory (if your OS and Teams app didn’t take 16gb of course).
i have >100GB blu ray media, and that's writeable. So those exist. My BD-R from 2016 reads them correctly and can write them, so it's not some "recent" thing, except maybe the capability to create the media. I think the largest BD-R available are around 120GB.
Luckily, the gen 7 tapes are 10-100 times that large, depending on who you ask. Each disk costs approximately $2-$5 as well, assuming you get some sort of discount. Tapes are more, they hold more, but at a certain point having a disc in a jewel case is better than having some tape. bluray drives are easy to find, tape readers, not so much.
MicroSD cards - about the size of a fingernail - absolutely come in sizes up to 1TB, that's not controversial or dodgy brands selling fakes. There's many brands selling cards at 512GB, ten times your BluRay example.
Portable flash drives using M.2 drives internally could reasonably be up to 8TB, but being at the high end they're expensive.
Samsung is a reputable brand that makes 256 GB and 512 GB SD cards (EVO Plus) - I have good experience with using it in Raspberry Pi. And "thumb drives" - USB sticks absolutely go into TBs - I'm using a 2 TB one, and I've seen colleagues use bigger. And you can put a modern M.2 NVMe SSD into USB-C casing and it's half the size of an old portable SSD...
It’s maybe a bit big to call it a “thumb drive” but I’ve been putting backups on a 2TB usb “portable ssd”. I’ve also got a 256GB thumb drive, which isn’t too far off.
if you take a dvd (dvd5 or dvd9 either way) on a linux machine with ~16GB of memory, and you read the entire disk once - say dd if=/dev/sr0 of=/dev/null - the entire thing will be in memory. You can then use whatever tools you want as if you had the disk in memory, and it will never touch the physical device again.
If i hadn't seen it myself i would have wondered why it wasn't already possible already.
Luckily, the gen 7 tapes are 10-100 times that large, depending on who you ask. Each disk costs approximately $2-$5 as well, assuming you get some sort of discount. Tapes are more, they hold more, but at a certain point having a disc in a jewel case is better than having some tape. bluray drives are easy to find, tape readers, not so much.