That's an extremely misleading title..
Anyway, we were in a pandemic. People were naturally buying more digital during that time because they weren't able to go out and purchase retail games. Makes sense that relative to the year before it, people started going out again and buying more retail games.
What year is this?
Online Sales of Physical media has dominated physical purchases in the industry since the 2000's
The pandemic did boost Digital sales there is no doubt about that, I ain't disputing what you're saying.
But that's because people was stuck at home and bored and bought digitally anyway or was impatient, not because they couldn't click order on a website and a brick and mortar store was the only way to purchase physical media.
On a side note, physical media is on the rise.
Even the PS5 Disc version is favoured over digital.
Maybe people are becoming wary of Digital...