Magnetic HDDs do suffer bit rot, yes. But perhaps more importantly the mechanisms suffer physical failure over time. You can't just pop the platters into a new drive, even if you had an identical model.
That's really the main disadvantage of hard drives: the media is permanently coupled to the drive. If your tape drive fails, you can just pop the tape into a working drive and still get your data back.
With older drives, pre-about-2010 I think, you can, as I understand it.
After that they added little NVRAM chips to the boards which hold data about the disk, so you need to make sure they match. I just fried a HDD controller with a bad SATA cable, so I'm having to switch the chip from one board to another to try to recover the data.
Oh dear, here we're talking about age deterioration. Swapping media as a solution only works if the remanence hasn't decayed below the recoverable threshold.
All magnetic media suffers bit rot by remanence decay (a natural analog phenomenon). It's just that tape by virtue of its construction and type of recording process has better data (S/N) margins (its storage longevity is better).
That's really the main disadvantage of hard drives: the media is permanently coupled to the drive. If your tape drive fails, you can just pop the tape into a working drive and still get your data back.