Not in my experience. I have seen more than 20 examples and its nearly always been the spinner that fails/failing. (I have seen apple ssds that have failed in 2012-2015 macbooks, however.) The whole concept of using an ssd, especially an early model ssd, as a frequently written buffer is a time bomb. Also, when you have to use low level tools the results you get rarely please the customer because all their structure is gone... i usually just refer them to a data recovery specialist and they usually wont pay 1000 and just give up. Diskwarrior was great in the old days... useless now in the apfs era. I downloaded diskdrill to try the other day but did not need it.
We can agree on most.
With working FD iMacs using a 121GB SSD, I will urgently recommend to split the FD and install macOS+programs onto the SSD (APFS) and the user folder and all data onto the HDD (hfs+).
Alternatively run macOS from a Thunderbolt SSD, even a USB3 SSD.
It is the safest way to run really fast and has the huge advantage to be nice to both the SDD and to the HDD.
Apple should have done that after an upgrade to Catalina, but I am pretty much convinced they
wanted the older iMacs to fail (or at least to become practically unusable) after a certain time running APFS on a spinner.
