Both can be true. I take the parent commenter to be talking about reading data off of the CD in a way that accounts for the irregularities from inconsistent spinning speeds, (I distinctly recall a friend pulling a CD out of the CD player and placing it back in to resume spinning, while a song was playing without any break in the song). Perhaps, additionally, the was some degree of accounting for resilience to things like blemishes and fingerprints.

It can nevertheless be true that the CDs were failing all the time. So robust error correction is real to achieve the degree of functionality that we did enjoy during the heyday of CDs, and despite this, the fragility of CDs as an information medium meant that they were still disappointing us.