Unless you are me, who has had tough lessons at The School of Hard Knocks, with postgraduate degrees from The College of Getting the Shit Kicked out of You.
Not to mention that, with Cloud this and that, local hardware is pretty fungible and easily "reincarnated" in a replacement device
Re Apple: this is true only for desktops or laptops. If you want to back up your iPhone you need a Mac to work with a local storage solution. And you cannot configure the Mac to use the HD to store the phone backups directly: the folder the Mac uses cannot be a symlink nor can it be configured. You have to sync all of your phone's data to the Mac, then sync the mac with time machine, which means your Mac needs to be large enough to store all of its data, plus the iPhone's.
Source: my hackintosh has small SSD but large HDD.
I had SSDs dying gradually and HDDs dying abruptly too. I think this is just the difference between the controller hardware failing or the firmware encountering some unrecoverable condition vs. failure of the storage medium.
That said, there still is the difference that HDDs retain data much longer, flash cells leak charge over time. So for long-term storage HDDs are still a little better, but "long" here means many years, so you're still in the domain where you're risking age-related failure, redundancy will be required either way.
If you don't write to it and it's kept at a constant and low temperature/humidity and it doesn't get jostled then the data will probably outlast you.
I keep a plastic lap pad under my laptop when carrying it around horizontally. I see people just letting the whole torque of the laptop bend the motherboard and it hurts me. Those laptops will one day not POST because the CPU, RAM, or GPU will have a pad lifted off the PCB.
An SSD randomly giving the ghost is one of my greatest fears when it comes to desktop computers, because there's no way to get any data off them when they die. With spinning rust you can usually send the drive to an expensive data recovery company who will likely transplant the platters and send you a copy of what's on disk, but if a flash chip is slightly damaged because of a short or whatever, you won't have such luck.
Yes, I know, I should make more backups, but every time I thought I'd gotten everything safely backed up, I found a file or folder that I forgot to include.
I’ve had an nvme reaching temps 70+ celsius, because the geniuses who designed the mobo put the socket right where cpu hot air flows..
I aged a couple of years when the machine bsoded and then told me windows files are missing. I thought everything is gone, but fortunately when the ssd colled down everything went back to normal.
Had to put an extra fan in the case, and disable couple of cpu cores though to make the system stable.
Most of these quirks are undefined behavior, and you won’t ever see the source code.