If you went with the flow of traffic, you started with cartridges then tape then disk. Nobody published on disk at first due to the higher costs, so early third-part was through tape.
IF you bought today, all you would need is disk, but that's not what I'm talking about. From birth to death, you had to have bought a cassette reader, then a disk drive.
So your big argument is that it was cheaper to play games on a console? You can apply that today as well, you know.
You could have went Floppy from the start and wouldn't have had any issues, and I suspect many did. I seriously doubt you will find any noteworthy Cassette only games that were not on Cartridge and/or Floppy.
But I get it, you were a big NES fanboy.
While I preferred to leave consoles behind much eariler. I haven't owned a console since I sold my ColecoVision and bought a C64 in 1983. Years before the NES even hit the North American Market.