I can't speak to the old generations of tape, prior to 2000. The LTO cartridges seem fairly sturdy to me, and I haven't run into many problems with the media itself. Unlike hard drives, tape media is fairly insensitive to shock, which makes it easy to transport. I've seen cases of water-damaged media, cases where the leader pin broke off (and got taped back on, and the tape was successfully read), cases where tapes were physically lost, cases where the database recording the locations of tapes was corrupted...

...but data durability has been overall excellent, and compares favorably to disk.