Many drives will do some amount of background reading on their own to scan for degraded data. But this isn't visible to the host system and not guaranteed, so it shouldn't be relied upon and doing some extra reads (eg. once a month) is harmless.
I strongly believe QLC SSDs are a great choice for NAS usage, unless it's very frequently modified data. It's still more expensive than hard drives, but the noise, power and performance benefits can be worth it.