good question 😉 I was going to mention this.

You can still use external tables. Those tables will be stored outside the main (root) metastore bucket/container.

https://docs.databricks.com/data-governance/unity-catalog/create-tables.html

https://docs.databricks.com/data-governance/unity-catalog/manage-external-locations-and-credentials....

then you can use parquet tables.

It seems like the way forward is to use managed tables with Unity Catalog, they are gaining some performance improvements over time.