This isn’t something I had known before and definitely would explain it. Every single manual for the server everywhere says that a blinking orange LED means the drive is 100% dead but if these are giving I/O timeouts or otherwise behaving weirdly it’d make sense to me why Discourse gives the 500 error code.
I am very anti-subscription and long-term it probably makes sense for me to bite the bullet and buy new SSDs once affordable again. If I spent $150 on some new SSDs for this server that I forever own I would much rather do that than pay Cloudflare $5 a month for the rest of eternity. If it’s free (which you say it is) I may look into it as a temporary alternative while I wait for this AI bubble to blow over 