Don't worry about your worries being wrong-worries, because your worries are real-worries. Those USB floppy drives have about a 1 in 3 chance of actually working. There's last I looked only one manufacturer left and no real quality control on them. I bought a $30ish at one point and it simply just doesn't read floppies. Not sure it even showed up in the USB device tree.

And that's 3.5". I can't imagine how to solve this for 5 1/4" and 8" floppies. Or tape media from the 70s mainframe days, etc.

Yikes, my worries were understated. I suppose there's a bunch of special components that they don't even manufacture anymore. Tbf, $30 is a bit too low. If I was serious about archiving or accessing old documents and wanted a reliable floppy drive, it's something I'd pay ~$300 for.. depending on the value of what was being recovered, someone might even pay $3000 for a specialist to recover it.