On what grounds exactly? You tested something, it turned out to perform below average, so you say you don't recommend buying it. Where's the crime?

Seems to have worked well enough for Backblaze for years and years now. Another major vendor publicly announcing that make X model Y has shitty reliability is as much pressure on the storage duopoly as we're likely to get.

There's no reason to be scared to share your experience with hardware.

Just do it in reverse: a list of drives that they have tested and can confirm work well; at the end of the list they just mention that they cannot recommend any other.

You would need to account for every drive firmware revision.

This is in fact standard practise for many software vendors.

How would it be a great way to get sued?

Backblaze publishes a great report.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-202...