It seems to be part of the trend to "obsolete" external personal storage devices and drives.
My first (owned) computer was a Mac, with OS8. This after having learned computers on Windows 3.1, before the Internet. The WIntel machine was a military setup, shipboard - and there was no use at our level of the Internet. When we needed data going out, we put it on a floppy to give to a COM guy to radio it over to BuPers or other Naval offices. Data for us came the same way, or sometimes floppies were mailed us.
The Mac readily accepted the new USB-driven drivers for Zip discs - great, additional storage beyond the 4gb hard-drive. No issue there...for the two years I had the Mac. It was quickly obsoleted and had a malfunction two years after I bought it. Not a big deal, since it was no longer supported. It just taught me, personally, that beyond all the hype, Macs didn't last.
I moved onto Win98 and then WinME...the second, a disaster, frequent crashing. Then W2000, a fair amount better. But it had issues with videos and data-transfers sometimes got corrupted. By this time I had a patch cord to use old computer hard drives as external storage.
Got another Mac...OSX...and found, alluva sudden, it WOULD NOT TRANSFER to external hard drives. It could read them, but wouldn't allow me to move data on them or add more. Could not even load files onto the internal hard drive. This, about the time the Cupertino crew was pushing "cloud storage."
Cowinkydink? There are no cowinkydinks. They wanted my data. And I'm a contrarian - when someone wants something from me, so badly, and promises they aren't benefiting...I know they intend to benefit, probably illicitly.
I went to Linux. And have had no storage issues, since.
These people KNOW this is happening; but they want to control, catalog, and have you dependent on their "cloud storage." Hacks have happened and will continue to happen. So will illicit sales of data and so will government cataloging of whatever data you're foolish enough to trust in the network.
Get some sort of Unix or Linux operating system. If you must use Windoze, use it for programs, work or networking. Store and manage your data with something not from Big Tech.