Yep, it's basically the best environment for them. Presumably relatively few writes compared to the uptime, in a case with few vibrations (!), very few power cycles (!!!). Basically all it does is spin on a highly precise bearing.
Anyway drive lisepans only matter for cost projections, when it comes to data integrity you should ALWAYS assume that a drive ia about to fail. Because sometimes it fails after 2 years and sometimes it runs for 20, that's just the luck of the draw.
Reddit has had extremely spotty reliability forever. It got better in recent years, but still came down every few weeks, or would just randomly say "you broke reddit!". Circa 2015 every evening it would just randomly return 50x errors a good chunk of the time because it was always overloaded.
Backend reliability mustn't be very high up their priority list. Well, neither is UX (old OR new reddit), and let's not pretend that they've been masterminds when it comes to ad placement either, so the real question is what do the higher ups want, and why can't they achieve it?
Communities can archive their data and wiki/FAQs, which is nice, and hopefully they'll have better SEO than astrosurfing articles about the same subject (hahahaha jk jk we know that's impossible as google has seemingly no interest in prioritizing organic content anymore).
But the alternatives don't offer anything even remotely close to
/top?t=all. This feature of reddit is the single greatest thing that has ever happened to the concept of "getting into a hobby", and just like that it's gone.