I have a dual NVMe USB3 caddy that's smaller than most 2.5 HDD housings with currently 2 2TB drives, you can buy 4 and 8TB nvme drives these days too. I can throw that thing out a car and it won't care.
And the drives are easily swappable and so are the electronics in the casing.
So no, 2.5" HDD's still are an utterly dead end of technology.
Especially with these and some other vendors, the USB interface is part of the drive (there's no SATA port on them), so you can't swap them or take them out for data recovery. They are HDD tech, which doesn't do shocks or any other sort of roughhousing, they are slow as shit and use far more power than any NVMe drive.