I for one prefer to have my laptops with as few moving (and especially spinning) parts as possible. In the days of half-terabyte USB sticks, having a disk reader inside a laptop is dead space/weight used for archiving/ripping, and certainly doesn't need to be as portable as the rest of the computer.
This weekend I'm replacing a kaput HD on a Dell laptop with an SDD (if I can figure out to reinstall Windows on it for the laptop's owner, fine, if not it's Kubuntu 20.04).
I have an external drive for CD/DVD/Bluray and another one for floppies that is shared between devices. The floppy drive -- a $14 Aliexpress generic -- is flaky but that usually seems more the fault of the media than the drive. How old are those disks? How fragile are those sliding covers?
My main laptop uses a dongle for wired Ethernet (a reasonable trade-off considering how rarely I use it),but I've seen ingeniously-thin RJ45 sockets built into some units.
- Evan