Whoever thought these things were a good design choice? Was there some freaky materials shortage with early DVD production that made people think they were a good idea? They're such a pointlessly user-hostile variation on the technology. "Let's make DVDs, but ensure that touching either side will damage the data. Also, let's leave ourselves only a tiny little ring to print the DVD name and disk number on so that people will need to look really close in good light to figure out which disk they have in their hand".
If you're going to mass-produce these, you need more complicated machinery to build in two stamped layers into each plastic disk, each one facing a different direction, as opposed to what's needed for single-sided DVDs to make a single stamped layer and a layer that's just printed on.
As far as I can tell, no one ever thought that double-sided CDs were a good idea, and CD hold much less audio than DVDs hold video.
Mostly, DVD makers seem to have figured this out early on, but the West Wing DVDs do this double-sided nonsense through season 3.
(In fact, the only DVDs I have that are double-sided besides the West Wing DVDs are a set I got of season one of the 1970s Wonder Woman)
In other news, I got the house jellyfin server working again over the holidays, set up the "automatic ripping machine" and am back to turning our DVD collection into something we might use.