LINUX from almost the beginning would support tape over SCSI very easily, as the original TAR command simply used the SCSI LUN as output file device. No mess of drivers, tape backup software or such, though there were wrappers to make TAR more user friendly, being just a shell script to sanitise input and try to limit the options you had to send.
Yes the VCR was a nice cheap alternative, as it was cheap, common and the tapes were ultra cheap as well, quite a good thing when a QIC drive was a much more expensive item, and the tapes were a lot of money as well. That it took longer and was mostly manual was not really much of a problem, just do not play the tapes to a TV set, as many did not like the video signal, and tore horribly, and some VCR models really did not like the video to record, you had issues with some budget models that cheaped out on record AGC, though later models with all in one chipsets for the video path, one 80 pin chip did every part from video in to video out, including the head switching, and also did OSD as well, all over an I2C bus to the other 80 pin microcontroller that did the syscon and VFD drive, and then a third did the audio, including on Panasonic machines the HIFI audio.