I lose my Time Machine drive, like, every year or two.

Sometimes, Time Machine just goes stupid and I have to wipe the drive and start over. All of my efforts in the past to copy or repair or do anything to a Time Machine drive has ended in folly, so when it starts acting up, I just wipe it and start anew.

Other times, it's the drive itself, and I swap it out.

99% of the time, it Just Works. Wiping the drive for me is more annoying than catastrophic (99.9999% of the time I don't care about my 18 month old data). It's mostly for local catastrophic fat fingering on my part, and to make sure I have a solid back up after I do a OS update. I have BackBlaze for "Why is there 5 feet mud in my burning house" scenarios.

Outside of that, I've always been able to recover from it.

My wife has a SSD drive she plugs into her laptop for TM backup. That machine at most makes laps around the house, so its not that big of a deal for her.

Apple customers pay for backup solutions to backup data they don't care about and they don't even care when it fails.

The bar is so low!

Replication isn't a backup. You need to make periodic copies of the sparse bundle / directory to actually have a backup.