There was a concerted effort to push the claim everywhere close to FreeNAS, to the point that another "community canon" was that FreeNAS is behind it, as they got money from selling you "certified NAS boxes with ECC memory".

The only things that really happened was that a) ZFS exposes how failure prone hardware is due to pervasive checksumming b) ZFS came from culture (and project goals) that prioritized data safety - as such, it was possibly first contact for many with strong recommendations about ECC memory