NT always installed from CDROM. The floppy loading process is because all platforms then could be relied upon to have some form of floppy from which you could install whatever custom HAL.DLL and storage driver for your specific controller that wasn't included in install media, for example any kind of HBA that was newer than your OS release.
The older style alternative was to wait for special "hardware update" release of the operating system you wanted to install.
ah, it wasn't clear to me, so I just wanted to point out exactly what the floppy was supposed to pass to the system.
NT4 was magical, I remember reading on the jewel case "for 386, Pentium Pro, MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha" or something like that, and the instructions on how to boot the installer - with only PC referencing a boot disk (and having done so before ElTorito that was truly magical for me)
By the time XP rolled around, CDROMs were common place.