@ Nec_V20
I'm wondering why you're mentioning RAID when criticising Blackblaze; do you realise that when multiple drives are run in a RAID configuration, the drives themselves don't work any differently, in any scenario it's the storage controller's job to tell the drive what to store.
I'm also wondering why you're saying that the person responsible is "criminally irresponsible" for buying such drives. The acronym "RAID" originally stood for:
Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or 'Independent') Disks
The point of RAID in the vast majority of cases is in the first letter: Redundancy. Drive failures are to be expected, so a competent sysadmin plans for it with as much budget as they can feasibly throw at it.
Your impression that RAID came about purely because businesses were running out of space is simply inaccurate. Using RAID for that reason makes very little sense as one can simply connect up another HDD to a computer, whereas you would need to reinitialise RAID0 every single time you add another disk "for more space"... what's the point? RAID0 (aside from obvious reliability concerns) makes things unnecessarily complicated if your only goal is to increase data storage capacity. The only valid reason to use RAID0 is to increase performance (with a large number of "ifs" and "buts"). Yet you then go on to talk about mirroring which does not increase the data storage capacity! 2x 250GB HDDs in RAID1 configuration = 250GB total capacity (ignoring GB/GiB).
If there were disks out there considered to be so reliable that redundancy isn't a cost-effective priority, then a lot of sysadmins would invest that money elsewhere. If say instead processors were deemed 'not particularly reliable', then server boards would be designed to allow redundancy in that department instead.
If a sysadmin is finding that a particular model of drive is failing a lot more often than others, the obvious thing to do is not to use that model any more. Blackblaze apparently did this and reported their findings, and for some reason you have a problem with this.
The only (on topic) reason why I might be inclined to question a sysadmin's competence when picking drives for such a scenario as Blackblaze's (as I understand it) would be if the person had been picking drives that the manufacturer had clearly marked as something like, "this drive is not designed to withstand stress caused by running 24x7, running it in such an environment will void the warranty and cause the drive to fail prematurely", which is a warning I'm not sure I've seen before on a HDD, possibly because (at least in my experience), HDDs tend to be more reliable if they're not being spun up and down on a regular basis.