Backblaze regularly releases failure rate statistics of their drives, and it’s often a big enough dataset to be quite meaningful. I haven’t been keeping up with it lately, but there certainly was a period of time where there were substantial differences in the failure rates of different manufacturers.
So while you do still need to have drive failure mitigation strategies, buying more reliable devices can definitely save you time and headache in the future by having to deal with failures less frequently.
Their bones are actually inert. Your bones just want to join their bones doing fuck all all day long. Their bones are doing your bones’ bidding.