dude you just argued that the disc drive being broken doesn't matter because you can play "rips" off a hard drive.
and not having a disc drive doesn't prevent you from playing digital games. far from making a PS5 "useless" if they took the auth servers offline.
also completely ignored the fact that many discs don't have the full game on them anyway and require a download. if those servers are offline, surely it's completely irrelevant if the disc drive can authorize?
not to mention you can even still download games for the almost 20 year old PSP. "but what if they take the servers down?!?!?" had been hyperbolic fear mongering for over a decade now. outside of publishers taking down individual games it still hasn't happened. frankly the amount of people that will give a fuck if they can authorize their external PS5 drive in 2040 is really fucking slim dude. and the console will be hacked to shit by then anyway so you can just play your "backups" off the SSD.
In this hypothetical future, 10 years from now there will be 100 million plus PS5s in the wild, people will have moved on to PS6 and be talking about PS6 PRO or PS7, and you'll be able to pick up a used PS5 for probably about the same price as the disk drive will cost at launch, or you'll be able to emulate all of these games on hardware that is 10-15x more powerful.
Why spend any time worrying about this ? It's a complaint in search of a problem.
The whole point is around further unnecessary crap dumped on actual customers since pirates won't really be affected. You don't care about retro games (in the 2040 it will be retro), but quite a few people do.
Why should folks be forced to buy whole replacement PS5 units if just a drive fails (if auth check can't be performed)? It's just a dumb thing to do, and its the same shit Apple is pulling where you can't even replace a screen on an iPhone now days without authorization. In addition to that, being able to legally rip PS5 games isn't a given. There is no way to do so right now at least if your PS5 is up to date.
Also, the fact that Sony right now allows downloads for PSP (yes, released 17 years ago in US) doesn't mean that they continue that policy in the future. Corporate policies change and putting trust in giant corporations is not something that anyone should be doing. Stop stanning for multi-$billion (or multi-$trillion in case of MS) corporations, they aren't your friends, they don't need you to defend them.
Again, for PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, PS5 (OG), you can repair things without the online check. Now additional burden and potential future issue is introduced that is simply unneeded. If Sony was worried about piracy, there are other ways to take care of it and clearly that wasn't a worry with OG PS5.