That tracks with my experience as well. Literally every single Seagate drive I’ve owned has died, while I have decade old WDs that are still trucking along with zero errors. I decided a while back that I was never touching Seagate again.
There isn’t much difference at all. Neither should have a cap.
Data moving across a network doesn’t have any per-unit cost to the people operating the network. Whether you use 5TB or 5GB doesn’t impact the bottom line of the ISPs at all.
The only justification for a data cap would be if they’ve overprovisioned their network and sold too many people plans that are too fast for their network to support, so they need to disincentivise people from actually using it. Even then that’s pretty shaky justification.
The difference between building your own car and designing your own internal combustion engine.