The last time I dealt with tapes was in the 1990s, and it was dead simple. We used tape backups at a company with only 150 people. I was the most junior admin so I had to be the tape monkey, but it was easy. Just run backups regularly, change the tape every couple of days and label it, ship a stack to the offsite storage and request the old stack back, and then do a test restore each time a stack came back.
The whole thing took maybe two hours a week.
When you're juggling 12 plates, a couple are gonna fall.
Everything else got easier, bigger, and faster.
Two decades back, you needed tape to cost effectively back up hundreds of gigabytes. These days, pretty much unless you have a spare room with an automatic tape library (robots moving tapes), you're too small for tape to make sense.
So, yeah - virtual tape library, while obviously having downsides, is massively useful for a small enterprise.