It's only a reasonable comparison if we're ignoring a large issue. I've spent the last 5 minutes looking for reports of failures due to tin whiskers, and mostly

It's only a reasonable comparison if we're ignoring a large issue. I've spent the last 5 minutes looking for reports of failures due to tin whiskers, and mostly what I see is trade mag notes and essays from about 15 years ago that anticipate a coming plague of electronics failures from tin whiskers. If you have more info about the scale of the avoidable harm in aggregate, as you put it, I'd love to see it.