“I absolutely detest the crazy industry politics and bad vendors that have made ECC memory so "special".”
A DIMM in Linus Torvalds’ desktop went bad after 2.5 years and corrupted his builds in the middle of a merge window. He spent days blaming new kernel bugs before memtest86+ found it. His machine supported ECC, but he couldn’t buy ECC DIMMs at a sane price when he built it. Intel spent years reserving error correction for server chips. Everyone else gets silent corruption.