My experience is that drives have been getting substantially better in this regard. If a drive is failing, it will usually collapse into read only mode and let you know that it is failing, giving you ample time to recover data.
That said, I do think backups are a good idea, and that Reed-Solomon codes are a good way to protect your data. I also think that managing bitrot is really the responsibility of the drive itself and maybe of the filesystem. Zfs and btrfs both offer bitrot protection.
And even solving bitrot, risks like fires, earthquakes, or war (for less fortunate countries) mean that data should be backed up in multiple physical locations anyway.
These are problems I've been attempting to address at https://sia.tech for the past two years. It's still in beta, but a full platform should be ready by March.