I've read these reports as well, but I can say that it's not my experience (we've gone through a few rounds of shucking at the Internet Archive, for economy and in one case necessity after the 2011 Thailand floods pinched the supply chain). Our raw failure rates on shucked drives are significantly higher, and the drives themselves are typically non-performant for high-throughput workloads (often being SMR disks/etc, though hopefully the move away from drive-managed SMR will finally kill that product category off).