I have a pretty small collection, mostly childhood purchases and hand-me-downs, but I've wanted to collect more for a while. By the time I had an allowance to spend on CDs, I was mostly ripping them to 320kbps MP3 for my iPod, but I still preferred to buy CDs over downloads, since it was only a little bit more for something with physicality, and I liked reading liner notes. After a short stint of messing with vinyl collecting, I appreciate them way more; you still get the ritual and the physical fetish but it takes up less space and sounds better and uses cheaper equipment (though I'll still buy dance singles to mix with). It's also infinitely cheaper for small/independent artists to press, so there's still a ton of interesting music that only came out on CDs and never got licensed for streaming.
Objectively, it's a huge technological improvement over vinyl, but, as far as changes to a medium go, it had an even more drastic effect on the video game industry. The PlayStation was what solidified it as the format for games, but there's a lot of interesting experiments with it on systems like the PC Engine/Turbografx for voice-acting, animated cutscenes, redbook audio, etc. It did also lead to a bunch of trash multimedia consoles (3DO, CD-i), but there's still some neat stuff on those. This all ultimately led to Final Fantasy VII being one of the biggest media events ever at the time.