I'm still not certain that they are failing 'by the bushel'. Everyone links back to Backblaze, who were using 8x5-rated drives in datacentres.
I'd expect to have seen lots of posts here about people losing data, but it's all been WD MyPassport.
Also, Seagate (along with every drive manufacturer ever) explicitly doesn't warranty your data. If you haven't gotten the message in the last two decades that you need backups, that's you're problem.
Also, anecdotal evidence is going to be pretty worthless. Given the number of those that have been sold (I'd guess in the tens of millions, maybe more), there will be plenty of people that received 2+ dead drives in a row even at <1% failure rates.