Also, it sounds like you described Vigil: https://github.com/munificent/vigil
Floppy disks were not cheap, expensive, easy to get, or reliable. It sucked.
Even on the U.S. east coast, I remember having to travel over an hour to get to the nearest store that sold floppy disks. Each BASF FlexyDisk cost $18 in 2026 money. So $50 if you wanted redundant long-term storage of one program.
That's why we printed everything out all the time; especially for archive storage.
…which also turned out to be a bad idea. Just in a different way.
I've got probably 30 5.25 floppies in my house, and I have a 5.25 drive and an old motherboard that can probably recognize that drive, and I've got the cables to connect the drive to the motherboad (and power supply). I'd guess that there's maybe a 20% chance that, if I spent a week trying to mash it all together I'd be able to get some data off of some of these floppies.
On other magnetic media the chances are between "haha, no" (oh, you've got an old 8 inch 10mb Bernoulli disk?) to 5% (oh, a QIC150 tape).
On the other hand, if I found a stack of moldy greenbar printout of some data, I'd say that most of the data can likely be recovered, and likely for not a tremendous amount of money.
For every Atari or Epyx, there were many dozens of very significant publishers who did their work on consumer-grade hardware.
Except for Atari and less than a handful of others with previous income, none started with PDPs on hand. They had to work up to that.
It's not like today with everything consolidated and full of VC money. Bootstrapping your way to success was de regur, and the playing field was wide open to anyone with a home computer and a little talent.