I had a similar experience with Samsung. I had a bunch of evo 870 SSDs up and die for no reason. Turns out, it was a firmware bug in the drive and they just need an update, but the update needs to take place before the drive fails.
I had to RMA the failures. The rest were updated without incident and have been running perfectly ever since.
I'd still buy Samsung.
I didn't lose a lot of data, but I can certainly understand holding a grudge on something like that. From the other comments here, hate for Seagate isn't exactly rare.
We have never not needed these.
We just forgot that they are required.
I'm sure the French could give us some pointers though.