Paper is much harder to secretly vanish (A) at scale and/or (B) remotely.

I always thought it was cool how some Ghost in The Shell movie/anime stuff involved storing very sensitive secrets as barcodes on paper, to be kept physically-secure before being read by cybernetic eyes.

There's also some line from one of the The Expanse books (Abbadon's Gate) which I can't easily call up here. The protagonist is inside an alien space-station following an AI's instructions to try to save the day, and he's curious why the AI doesn't just do it. The AI tells him that for the builders of that place, having physical existence was a kind of authority all on its own.

People are remarkably more hesitant to destroy physical records than digital ones, in my experience. Also, you have to go to a place and find the thing to destroy it - with digital records, you can press a button from across the world.

fire is pretty effective at that.

don't even have to torch the entire document, just enough to make it inadmissible for legal purposes.