>A lot of the nonsense around shredding hard drives is just the drive industry convincing people that they need to destroy perfectly good devices.

Unless you're willing to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that each and every such hard drive does not in any shape or form contain sensitive information and pay hefty fines and jail time when you inevitably fail, the only nonsense here is you. It has been proven time and time again that data once written can be and will be recovered.

Any storage media that contains or contained sensitive information must be physically destroyed. That is the only surefire, foolproof way that we currently know of to securely and permanently delete sensitive information.