They seem emboldened by the event where they silently introduced SMR into NAS drives. That is, they didn't suffer any real consequences there, so now it's a free-for-all.
I previously would never have considered buying Seagate, but since the debacle, when it came to replacing a failed drive in a ZFS array of WD Red CMR drives, I couldn't trust I'd get a drive that would actually resilver so I just replaced them all with Seagate IronWolf NAS drives.
The ops team at my work also avoids WD now, and I no longer buy WD SSDs or external drives because of this distrust.
(Anecdotally) Not from me. SMR or not, their easystore drives that you can shuck are cheap. Between buying a cheap drive and buying something else, I like to spend less money, so I'd choose the easystores.
Granted, I don't know how much has changed with the easystores since the SMR debacle since I've not really been in the hard drive market for a while.
I'm not really much of a shucker but I do it from time to time. That being said, I do save the SATA board and power supply (and USB) that I get when I finish the shuck. I haven't had to yet, but it possibly could be handy for connecting up an internal 3.5" drive externally, like if I want to quickly get some data off of it or something.