Not entirely pointless. You can connect an external optical drive even to most modern of macs and it'll work. That contraption consisting of a full-size DVD drive and a SATA-USB adapter with external power, plugged into a USB-A/USB-C adapter and then my M1 macbook, for that one time when I was given a CD and was curious to see what's on it? It worked flawlessly. Though I've never tried burning discs on macOS, I don't see a reason why it shouldn't work.
Fun fact. That's the oldest product they still sell as it was introduced with the original MacBook Air in 2008. They've done literally nothing to it and it sill comes with a USB A cable despite most of their computers not having one at all. It also is pretty bad value these days when a Blu-ray writer costs about the same.
It depends on what you're using it for. I have a couple of Blu-Ray drives, and they're much more finicky than the SuperDrive.
When a disc won't read or write in my Pioneer drive, I try it in my no-name Blu-ray drive, and when that fails, I try it in the SuperDrive, and it always works.
I consider something that works reliably 99% of the time to be a better value than something that works 80% of the time.
