I'm a bit skeptical of these conclusions without more detail on the methodology. Does "100% success rate!" mean the author was able to mount the disks and read some files off them? Or did they actually have some method to verify check-sums of every file to identify bitrot?
I guess that was just an instance of the "Survivor Bias". I burnt hundreds of CD-R/DVD-R/DVD-RW disks from a various of vendors(mostly Sony, TDK, Verbatim, Kodak, maybe some other brands which I could not remember clearly, each brand should be at least 50 as I had always bought 50 pack tubes.) around 15 years ago and left them untouched for around 8 years when I needed to retrieve something from those archives. So I decided to check the health of those disks which was quite disappointing. I simply tried if I could read the first 10 disks in each tube and it turned out, for a brand, all 10 were not even able to be recognized. Other brands performed from 3, to 8 in 10 disks could be read. That was just simply trying to read, so the integrity of the contents were not checked at all. The only good thing was that I managed to locate what I was looking for and it was in RAR format which validates the hash when extracting, it was good. So I immediately tried to move those I wanted to keep to HDDs and the loss rate was over 50%, and for those recovered, I didn't have much confidence regarding their integrity neither as no checksums saved. So basically I wasted lots of time and money by choosing optical drives as archive media. In the mean time, all files I left on HDDs were perfectly fine. This might be another survivor bias too.
It matches my experience. Even decades-old CD-ROMs only fail when they are scratched or physically damaged, which you can prevent by keeping them in appropriate cases and always put them back after use.
My own experience is different. I had several brands of CD media that lasted less than 10 years. Many of them you could see the damage (cracks through the shiny layer). Some were dark blue, some a light blue. Almost all of them were bad. I had them stored in a light proof zipper pouch and stored at room temperature in a closet. Maybe something special happened to them over the years but very few worked. This would have been some of the first CD-R and CD-RW media available. I opened them more than 20 years ago so the media would have been 30 to 40 years old today.
Some plastics can react with other plastics you have to be careful when storing long term in plastic bags for this reason. I'm not at all sure if this played a part in your CDs but it's possible.
Again - did you use some method to confirm there was zero bitrot on these discs? Or are you concluding they were still good simply because you were able to get data off them?
