

those disks were not spinning for maybe 3 weeks total
This is actually a good thing for longevity. Start up and stopping is the hardest part of a drive’s life. So you will see more failures on a personal PC that you turn off every night than a server drive running 24/7. Laptop drives will typically fare the worst as they may be power cycled many times a day, often fully stop when idle for power saving and get shaken much more than other drives.
This is a case of the streetlight effect. Evaluating the skills needed to do the job is very difficult in an interview setting, so most of the focus going on evaluating skills that are easy to evaluate in an interview (such as people skills).
It isn’t wrong, as all else being equal it is still better to hire the person with better skills that you can measure but obviously is not a strong evaluation of candidate quality.