As someone totally unfamiliar with tape aside from knowing some places still use it for archival and recording audio to tape - something totally different - is

As someone totally unfamiliar with tape aside from knowing some places still use it for archival and recording audio to tape - something totally different - is incredibly expensive and most (if not all?) recording tape is out of production, I’m surprised storage tape is still a thing. How does storage tape even work? Is this literal tape in a cartridge much like tape in a cassette tape? I assume we’re not talking about data stored in 1s and 0s? Is this technically an analog medium!? Going to do some googling now to quell my curiosity. The article does seem targeted at consumers. I’m going to guess I’d need some expensive hardware to even use one of these $60 tape drives.