Hard drives and types -- what makes them so different?

The popular answer to this question is a load of rubbish. Not only is it technically incorrect but there are no sources and yet it has a lot of upvotes. It is very difficult to disprove something that is so vague, the differences in firmware strategy, etc. happen over time, they arn't neccesarily apparent in benchmarks/noise tests.

How do we deal with people upvoting what they want to hear rather than what is correct?