I’m not nearly so optimistic. I think we have a generation of kids now who mostly never owned any physical media, having grown up with Netflix instead of vhs/dvd, Spotify instead of CDs, steam instead of retail games, etc.
I see nothing wrong with abandoning physical media - as storage got larger and internet faster, being limited by clunky disks has become kinda pointless unless you're specifically into collecting.
I see nothing wrong with moving on from them as long as it's towards local DRMless files.
Sure, but we didn’t go from physical media to online delivery of outright purchased digital goods. We overwhelmingly transitioned to subscription streaming or “purchasing” revocably licensed copies with no guarantee of future delivery and drm on any downloaded copy.
I don't think it's generational. I got the impression it's a share of about every age group.
Also, ownership can be a side effect for even those who don't care, just because they're used to not paying for things. For example, when I got Minecraft for free as a little kid, it was because nobody would buy it for me, while in hindsight this also meant no account that could potentially be lost when transition to Microsoft accounts began.