Physical is practically dead already. We're mostly just buying physical licenses to digital downloads now.
Sad.
That's absolutely wrong and that's what they want you to think and a lot of misinforled users are spreading misinformations about this. That may be true for Xbox, I agree, but that's absolutely and totally wrong for PlayStation and Nintendo. That's why games reach the "Gold" status.
Every single game on these platform are playable without any internet connection AT ALL and without day one patch, with very rare few school cases exception (Activison with COD on single compaign or Hogwarts Legacy).
They want you to give up.
All consoles games I buy are physical and extremely far from dead, here, in Europe. That's a very US thing to think that disc are only digital key, that's not the case at all. They contains ALL the game data (again with some few exceptions of lazy publishers).
Even better: prices of physical games are much lower than digital stores not only at launch but also beyond the launch when they goes so low on sales or not thanks to the mainstream distributors competition.
Example: Right now I can buy Super Mario Wonder on switch on a physical store for
45€ instead of 60€ on Nintendo Store
Detective Pikachu is at 37€ physically instead of 50€ digitally.
And that's the same story for all PS5 games. Physical is not dead AT ALL and discs are far from a "digital key only": they always contains all the game.
(with, again, Xbox/Microsoft being the exception this gen since they dropped their balls considering their plan were always to see you subscribe something from them for life and goes digital to take control of your ownership)