I suspect most of the "corruption" RPi users experience is likely bad power (shitty undersized USB power bricks) glitching the CPU and causing the filesystem to corrupt. The SD card is likely doing exactly as it's being told by the host system - write (invalid) data to blocks, which it does.

I had more than my fair share of SD failures running pis off their official power supplies.

It really is a high failure rate.

"Enterprise" Boot SD's in servers love to die.

More than likely due to being in a warm box...

Do pis have an official power supply?

Yes. https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/power-supply/

I have always bought the official power supply, yet of the two Pi 3s that I have connected to my TV at home, the one that runs Kodi/OSMC to serve up movies has never suffered any filesystem corruption, despite it suffering repeated power outages without warning (it's low enough to the ground that the toddler has often pulled the power cable out, and I haven't been able to find a better place to keep it). The other one, bought at the same time from the same source, is meant to be the one the kids use for programming in Snap!, a variant of MIT Scratch that doesn't have the artificial limitations that Scratch has. (Snap! functions — the exclamation mark is part of the name — can take lists as input, whereas Scratch functions can only take numbers or strings, giving it an artificial ceiling; also, Snap! functions can take functions as input and return functions, making higher-order programming possible, while Scratch deliberately does not allow that). However, that Raspberry Pi has suffered two SD card failures in the past year; it's been down more often than it's been up, and I've ended up using either my laptop or my wife's laptop for my kids' programming lessons.

I've had enough SD and micro-SD cards die on phones and cameras to doubt that is the only problem.

People probably see more of a problem on raspberry pis because they write more to the memory than other systems.

Reminds me of years ago, I had to send a load of photos to a client of something I'd travelled 5 hours to photograph.

Didn't even check, just took and sent. Then went back.

Only to find that the SD card in the phone was dying, and every image was corrupted from about 1/3 down...

It's actually weird that Raspberry Pis seem so bad at using SD cards.

I've just scrapped a large PBX which had a whopping 8MB SD card in it. Its 486 processor booted Linux off the SD card, it wrote CDRs to the SD card, it served said CDRs up over a web interface off it, it saved its logs to the card, and all the other day-to-day chatter of a running system.

It was installed pretty much 20 years ago. The date sticker on the SD card shows that it was replaced 18 years ago, presumably as part of an upgrade.

I'm going to guess that it was not a normal COTS SD card, and instead designed for continuous writes.

The factors for SD card failures in raspberry pi seem to be mostly SD cards not meant for the purpose and having things like swap, atime or disk logs enabled which leads to unnecessary writes.

It just appears to be a pretty standard Sandisk SD card.

Because of a properly configured, boot disk. Just boots once per power cycle.

Meanwhile something like the pi, on most images, is writing logs to the storage CONSTANTLY. Not to mention is regularly booted.

This was constantly writing to the SD card. It was the only storage on the device.

Rebooting it was a big deal though, so that rarely happened.