> Every tape library we used that was automatic, the drives asked for tape and the tape library just looked up in which slot it is.

This is an interesting point - these days, tape is in the very top end of the market, both when you have too much data to fit on spinning metal (it's twice as dense in volume), and have regulators making sure you have off-site offline archives going back a number of years.

An interesting shift is happening, however - flash is now much denser per volume than tape, and can be re-written more times. It needs periodic refreshing, but, if you keep it at, say, -10C it should keep data for decades. As data volumes increase, flash might become an option for near and off-line storage. The on and near-line archives also would look a lot more like racks of storage servers, because the medium has a built-in drive and doesn't need a robot moving it to a set of mechanical devices. Downside is that it's thousands of times more expensive than tape.