For most of us the majority of our photos never make it to the print stage. We simply keep them electronically, which seems fine, especially with cloud storage. We might get prints made, eventually.
When we had rolls of film developed and printed we often got more than we wanted. All of our rejects and mistakes got printed along with our gems. We had the same basic storage problem, only it was in a drawer or a box rather than a hard drive. Overproducing is not new.
For those photographers who processed and their own work, negatives would build up waiting to be printed and potentially get lost in the shuffle.
But fortunately, you don’t have to worry about old negatives or prints not being retrievable and viewable. Chances are your eyeball operating system still works the way older models did 10,20, 100 years ago.