"they'll never wear out but they will sure as heck rust up"
Curiously enough, that is exactly the principal problem one has noted in the current generation of SATA connectors -- exposure to moisture with some modest amount of corrosive chemical (salt suffices) will frustrate the longer-term of SATA connectors that are either dampened directly or exposed to open air of an aggressive kind.
Pets and free-range vermin with territorial marking habits can ruin many a connection -- with just a single essay.
Older generations of disk drive connectors had much more surface area for contacts to touch their mates (at higher mating pressures and better wiping action to remove contaminants and oxides), had larger physical barriers for moisture creepage along insulated spaces between contacts, and possibly also had better chemistry in the contact metals.
Newer contacts one sees on drives and cables shipped with them are tinier, carry less current, and seem to not be made with the same care to prevention of oxidation and corrosion. The Gold standard (which was actually a plating layer of gold over nickel or similar underlayment that prevents ions migrating through the plating to contaminate mating surfaces) seems to have been replaced with unpredictable variants.
Eyeball examination of the visible male bits and down into those tiny female slots before mating can help to save the longer-term grief of an intermittently fouled connection...... the classic
Wackelkontakt.