I saw some CNC controllers in the 90’s that were loaded up using paper tape - essentially punched cards but in a tape format.
The admins said they had to load a machine maybe once a year, so no reason to switch to anything else.
These things ran non-stop for years at a time, in a rough environment. They had added some kind of networking (not sure what back then, may have just been a serial connection) so they could send jobs to specific CNC machines using a desktop on the network.