[Vroomfondel]

today’s 1-inch thumb drives ... last much longer

Nope. Anything you have stored on flash is a charge on a capacitor that is slowly draining away.

An article from CMU in 2015 writes that "Today's flash devices, which do not require flash refresh, have a typical retention age of 1 year at room temperature." And that temperature can lower the retention time exponentially.

[Heart-Rest]

Are you familiar with 8-inch floppy disks?   Unlike the later, vastly improved, 3-inch hard-plastic enclosed "floppy disks", the 8-inch floppy disks were really bendable floppy disks, unprotected by the hard plastic encasement the 3-inch ones had, and, as such, were very easily damaged by handling, dust, etc., and had to be duplicated quite often, as they simply did not have a long life expectancy.

Now I know for a fact that your article's claim to 1-year thumb-drive data retention is inaccurate, as I've personally had thumb drive data last much longer than 1 year.

It depends, of course, on the quality of the thumb drive being used, how often and exactly how it is being used, how and where it is stored, etc., but if you do a simple Google search on something like 'thumb drive data life expectancy', many technical sites declare that thumb-drive data can last for 10 years or more.