This is 21st century American business. Synology wasn't going to choose their drives for maximum reliability after a long, hard, and most importantly expensive benchmarking period, they were going to stuff the cheapest drives they could buy from suppliers in there and charge more than any other drive. There's a very reasonable chance this would have produced lower quality outcomes and more support calls in the long run than random drives purchased on the open market.

Yes, this is absolutely deeply cynical, but my priors were earned the hard way, you might say.