Apple announcement triggered some weird flashbacks...

[A Black Falcon]

Better options, in the late '90s? Like what? Zip drives hold more data, but are also magnetic media so unfortunately they're just as unreliable as regular floppies. USB did exist (I presume that the iMac had a USB port?), but flash drives were not a thing yet, not really. And CD-Rs or CD-RWs are definitely not any kind of replacement, they're too limited in writes, media, etc. Even today people often want things on some physical format and not just the internet, and in the iMac's time that was even more true... Apple got rid of the floppy drive a good 5-8 years too early. I would say that only once flashdrives became cheap and affordable did getting rid of floppy drives make sense.