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I was growing up in the 90s. Zip drives definitely did not dominate; they were a failure. My dad actually did use zip drive personally at home so I'm familiar with them, but I never saw them in school, and they were not used commonly by most people. Most people never seem to have ever heard of them.

When I grew up 3.5inch floppy disks were the standard from the late 80s into the 90s. In the mid 90s files were getting bigger so yes there was a need for more storage than 1.44mb on an 3.5inch floppy disk for some people. But most Word documents would still fit on a floppy disk, and of course email was a thing (albeit the internet was slow and transfers could take ages). You could also Zip a file (not Zip Drive but the Zip file format) and split it into 1.44mb chunks to use multiple floppies.

So I remember when Iomega's Zip Drives came out. They did look good but the problem was they were just too expensive - both the disks and the readers - any they just weren't in the vast majority of computers so weren't useful, so they never took off. Whats the point of putting a file on a Zip Disk if the computer at the other end doesn't have a drive to take it? I'm sure some business switched to them but they never really became truly mainstream.

Instead CD was definitely the dominant format. Almost all new computers in the 90s (certainly mid to late 90s anyway) had a built in CD drive. And then CD-R (CD write once) drives came along. You either made do with floppys & the internet, or you had a CD-R drive if you wanted to transfer big files. CD could be slow to write but was always quick to read; and Zip Drives were just always slow. And of course music was the big thing for young people - so you'd rip your favourite songs and burn them onto a CD and could play it anywhere - your walkman, your Hifi, your mates car (if they were lucky enough to have a CD player). So CD-R drives just became essential, and especially anyone with any tech interest. If you were into games you might also rip your favourite games and burn those onto a CD too. Video just wasn't really a thing until 1998 when DivX came along and that took a little while to take off, but again CD was the star.

I remember actually my 6th Form College in the early 2000s DID buy computers with in-built Zip Drives, but by then it was too late - the internet was already fast enough & USB sticks had appeared. Even my dad wasn't using them any-more and he'd been an early adopter.