It depends the purpose.
Recently i decommissioned NAS/MEDIA disks that was online for almost 10 years at home.
On a total of 4, only one having a large batch of bad sectors (that was customer hdd)
On more "crucial" storage pool, i use redudancy and let the failure to come.
For spinning disks, it's not so rare for me to reach 50K+ POH and 5-7 years.
But when i reach such POH, as soon as i can find a good deal (on ebay or other) i try to jump into for reducing the POH.
I saw the same article and let me a bit confusing.
My own experience is much more like this about "crash":
- When new and start their online live (the disk clash in the first year)
- When moving it (post employes playing footballs with thems)
- After many years (often after 7 years)
I think cycle counts may have an impact (it's only subjective, i haven't any statistics).
But my customer drive having bad sectors was the one set on a media device connected to the tv.
This device was powered on/off multiples times per day for 10 years (maybe 3 or 4 times per days) and i think it was a factor.
offtopic : For now, i'm more annoyed/confused with cold SSD (specially entreprise ones) that can loose data in a range of weeks or a year.
Now, you can't just unplug a SSD and expecting to keep data for a long term storage (but for a spinning disk you can)