That's weird, I've always thought of floppies as pretty durable. The 3.5" ones anyway; the older larger ones were flimsier. On the 3.5" ones the little metal cover would get bent sometimes, or occasionally crushed if someone put one in a back pocket and forgot before they sat down; but in my career I've had a lot more thumbdrives broken off in the port than bent/crushed floppies. How did you find most of yours broke? Maybe I had an abundance of clumsy colleagues... or maybe I joined the IT workforce too late to have witnessed the tsunami of broken floppies!
Bent and crushed floppies were less of a problem than simple failures of reading and writing them, which in my memory happened much more often than they do to USB drives now. I don't see people breaking usb sticks in half that often either.
Mainly due to proprietary hardware+software solutions which cannot be ported now and remaking them with new hardware will require redoing the same processes as before (probably with additional stuff added by later laws) all over again.
If you try to replace just the hardware, you get fun solutions like a modern computer with a VM running Dosbox on critical infrastructure. Hey, if it works and your boss is willing to sign off on it...
Hehe, a similar thingy happened in one of my previous companies.
The CPU was easily spoofed using qemu but in that case the whole OS was almost immutable with hardcoded bus configs for the video card (some old pre ATI card), which I was unable to pass through, causing the project to be taken out of my hands. I feel like it didn't go forward after that.