Before you had optical media, you had cable matrices where you could ‘write’ the matrix once by overloading individual cables, thereby blowing/burning them like a fuse.
Every media is writable at least once, but some media is erasable/re-writable a finite number of times (eg. RW-CDs can be rewritten some 10-100 times and flash can be rewritten some 10000 times).
Since the process of writing to read-only storage is destructible, and since you tended to burn the individual cables in the cable matrix, it became known as ‘burning’.
Originally, it had nothing to do with lasers or optical media.
Before you had optical media, you had cable matrices where you could ‘write’ the matrix once by overloading individual cables, thereby blowing/burning them like a fuse.
Every media is writable at least once, but some media is erasable/re-writable a finite number of times (eg. RW-CDs can be rewritten some 10-100 times and flash can be rewritten some 10000 times).
Since the process of writing to read-only storage is destructible, and since you tended to burn the individual cables in the cable matrix, it became known as ‘burning’.
Originally, it had nothing to do with lasers or optical media.