"I trusted all my important data to a single point of failure and now I'm screwed".

So, yes, I respect that SanDisk's drive may have a manufacturing defect and that sucks but they have to share the blame for this. Seriously, drive mirroring is a thing and every single OS supports it out of the box. A proper RAID system is a thing and even better. Adding duplicate storage, be it cloud, another NAS or backing up to tape is even better still. It's the 21st century, you should know that by now if your literal job is based on storing data.

I know these comments are going to be full of people touting the virtues of having backup drives, NAS, or other high level data protection, but am I the crazy one? Knock on wood, I know nothing lasts forever, but I have decade+ old usb drives still going strong. How do they burn through so many externals?

All the hard drives I own are Sandisk and WD. I have Windows installed on a SanDisk SSD and Steam on another SanDisk SSD. My WD 4TB Blue HDD and WD 4TB Elements Portable HD are for back ups and both are 5 years old now. I haven't had any issues. Some of the Verge commentors do mention it could be a MacOS thing.