From my personal experience, the article and the comments I read here they seriously undersold the reliability of rewriting. For any other RW medium (audio or video cassettes, even floppies) I remember ad campaigns by Sony, TDK, Philips, … on tv. But not for these.
I feel in general the industry was more conservative making these kind of estimates than it is today. I assume they also benefited from years of CD-RW field experience honing the tech.
