The user is trapped. You cannot use the USB stick to get the driver that allows you to use the USB stick. This forced users in the early 2000s, and retro enthusiasts today, to rely on "sneakernet" using older technologies—burning the driver onto a CD-R, or copying it onto a stack of 15 floppy disks—just to enable the modern convenience of USB.
Why would anyone endure this? For those running legacy industrial machinery, vintage point-of-sale systems, or classic gaming rigs, Windows 98 is not a choice but a necessity. The need to transfer files from a modern PC to a retro machine has kept the search for Windows 98 USB drivers alive. The community’s solution eventually coalesced around a few heroic, unofficial generic drivers, most notably ’s NUSB (Nusb 3.6), which reverse-engineered and repackaged the USB mass storage drivers from Windows ME. This third-party driver, released years after Microsoft had abandoned Windows 98, became the de facto standard, proving that the user community often finishes what corporations start. windows 98 usb stick driver
After ensuring USB support is enabled: