I used esata back in the day and I loved it. I had a second hard drive that I could plug into my laptop with all my games on it. This was back when SSDs were $1 per GB on a good day so 120GB SSDs were typical.

And even in the early days of USB 3 external HDDs were slow. It wasn’t until uasp became a thing that they didn’t suck outside of backing up large files.