Please re-read that post.
According to @SpencerJ: "Either due to counterfeit devices being sold or a manufacturing change directly from SanDisk."
I'm not aware of any reports on anything related to SanDisk changing their manufacturing practices.
Besides it would make absolutely no sense for them to do such a thing.
It's been mentioned numerous times on this very thread that the online market (particularly Amazon) is flooded with counterfeit USB drives.
e.g. even by buying directly from the Amazon store instead of one of their third party sellers it would still give no guarantee of receiving the real thing due to Amazon's bin mixing practices.
The situation is not exclusive to SanDisk.
Every popular brand has its share of counterfeits floating around.
Therefore It's been recommended to only shop at big Brick-n-Mortar electronics stores in order minimize chances of getting a counterfeit USB drive.
Or even better, use one of the recommended industrial grade USBs.
There's no need to complicate this thread.
Fake USB drives are unreliable and prone to failure.
But you won't invalidate your license in any way, only introduce some downtime and an inconvenience of replacing the failed drive (hopefully with a real one this time) and transferring your license and configuration to a new USB drive with a different GUID.
The USB drive market has always been plagued by cheap counterfeits featuring redundant GUIDs, with many "victims" all over the world using them without a slightest suspicion that they've been scammed.
As opposed to users of Unraid where every USB drive must be checked for a unique, never used up with Unraid GUID.
Doesn't mean that Unraid has a unique ability to detect fakes.
It just cross-references the new drive GUID against the previously registered ones.
Makers of fakes don't bother to issue a unique GUID to every USB they produce.
That's how multiple fakes end up with batches of the same GUID.
Which still won't preclude Unraid from issuing a license to the first one to be registered out of that GUID batch.
But it will render the remaining ones unusable for Unraid.
You might want to test one out of your 3-pack to see how it performs:
https://whatsoftware.com/how-to-check-and-test-usb-flash-drive/
Also wonder what info is displayed in summary:
https://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbtreeview_e.html