tmtomh
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It’s not a myth. In the early days, there was a manufacturing defect that lead to delamination of the surface. I’ve seen it first hand.. must have been 8 or so Never once after that with pressed CDs.
I've seen that too, and more: delamination on some Polygram CDs and the infamous "sticky" Nimbus CDs; pinholes in the metal-foil layer right from the start because of manufacturing errors; tiny air gaps on the edges of CDs that result in the metal foil layer gradually oxidizing and making the disc hard or impossible to read ("bronzing"); and general bit rot with no known cause.
But as @Robin L notes, all of these problems fall into one of two categories: (1) problems in the first years that were remedied soon thereafter; and (2) the normal, very small percentage rate of failure that occurs with any mass-produced item. Those problems are not endemic to the medium and not typical.
Billions of hardware devices will inevitably fail because the capacitors inside them will drift too far out of spec or explode. But for the most part that process takes decades. That's not the same thing as the "capacitor plague" of the late 1990s and early 2000s (or whenever it was exactly), in which capacitors failed very prematurely because they were incorrectly manufactured (they were made from a formula stolen through corporate espionage, and the formula happened to be incomplete). I think it matters whether a format, medium, or product type is inherently unreliable versus whether it is highly reliable but has occasional failures.
EDIT: here's a link about it.
Capacitor plague - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org