I have read this complaint before, and it is wrong. Most, probably nearly all, digital information will be translated into new formats as they become important, largely because it will be increasingly automated and increasingly inexpensive (both because of the automation and because newer hardware is cheaper).
What you say is perfectly reasonable regarding popular content like movies and novels. Even computer games. However, of personal data like photos and writings, much will be lost. People (or their children or their grandchildren, etc) won't bother to convert everything to new formats and they won't bother to copy all files when they upgrade hardware. Alternatively, they could upload their data to a third party who, for an annual fee, would store and continually upgrade the files to newer formats. However, companies go bust. Conversion software is buggy. Passwords get lost or not handed on. Descendants go through financial bad patches. A single break in the chain is enough to destroy information.
Thus to preserve data you really do have mingle it with hardware and mass reproduce the whole thing. In the biological analogy, genes are the data, DNA is the medium and the rest of the seed is the 'reader'. Making hundreds or thousands of copies ensures against total loss.
Actually, closed source software, like most games is the bigger risk. I think that as drive sizes continue to grow, and with cloud-sourced backups, more stuff will simply be automatically translated. And most personal photos and writings are already lost, and always have been. More will almost certainly be saved in the future, not least because digital photos are shareable and copiable at minimal cost unlike the past. Print photos and handwritten journals were far too expensive to copy, and were expensive to store and move, most were lost every generation.
Hacker News is the last place I would have expected to have to defend the obvious improvements available in digital media.
