This is interesting, I didn't know Chrome did this. But it doesn't back up the claim that "[i]f you have media or backup drives [Chrome] just constantly adds wear to them." Does anyone have anything on that?
Even spinning rust wears out eventually. Not knowing any details about how often Chrome did this, it is hard to say just how significant this wear would be compared to other normal uses of the media. But it is clear that wear would occur to some degree.
Only write cycles cause wear, read cycles don't cause any meaningful wear.