A couple decades ago the employee at my local headshop raised the pipe I was looking at to shoulder level, and dropped it onto the wood floor. When it emerged entirely unscathed it felt like a magic trick and he said "it's pyrex" and ever since then I truly believe the material is magic.

That pipe lasted 20+ years until I lost it, meanwhile I broke at least 10 pipes of thicker normal glass. I dropped it in the sink and on the floor countless numbers of times when I braced myself for the sad cleanup, but it always survived.

What pipes did you have made from “normal glass”? If they were blown pipes that contacted heat, they were almost surely borosilicate (Pyrex/Simax/Duran/Kimax) as well. The only smoking items typically made from soda lime are water pipes which use a removable slide, which is borosilicate. (I was a boro glassblower for about 15 years).

There are more than two decades since I use only glass vessels for cooking, eating, drinking or storing food, so I have been using many dozens of them.

About half of the glassware that I have been using has been from borosilicate glass and the other half from tempered soda-lime glass. I would have used only borosilicate glass, but it is more difficult to find every size and shape that one may want in borosilicate glass.

Even if not frequently, glassware has been dropped from time to time on floors or in kitchen sinks. Such shocks would have shattered traditional glass, but in most cases both borosilicate glass and tempered soda-lime glass survive.

From an approximately equal number of shocks during the years, I have broken a single borosilicate glass object, a double-walled drinking glass with extremely thin walls, while I have broken somewhere between six and ten tempered glass objects.

The only reason why someone may say that for a certain type of glassware borosilicate glass may be less durable is because it is frequent to make borosilicate glassware with thinner walls, because of its better toughness, while the objects made of tempered glass are invariably made with thick walls, to reduce the risk of breakage.

At equal wall thickness, there is no way for a tempered glass object to be more durable than a borosilicate object.

Moreover I have never seen a borosilicate glass object damaged by thermal shock, but I have broken a tempered glass teapot when attempting to cool it after boiling water in it.

Ask any glass worker

Boro got heavy use in scientific glassware for more than one reason (durability, neutrality, etc)

Soda-Lime glass is the standard glass your think of and it's weak af.

Pipe makers would show off their Boro pipes by throwing them at the ground and having them bounce and stay intact.... Theres a reason that was the way to show off the product compared to traditional glass pipes...