Most of these observations are subjective. I’ve had some Seagate drives that worked well but were very hot and wasted energy. On the other hand WD was crap so far, starting with 3 TB. Not because of quality, but because of power saving features that were a major annoyance to me (green and some blue drives). Red drives I had were mostly fine, even they wore out pretty quickly (Load_Cycle_Count bugs). They ran at 0% health left for a few years and had other awful SMART and on-drive controller bugs.
Since Seagate and WD are essentially the same company and they lied about SMR before, I wouldn’t buy either of them.
There is nothing to refurbish in drives. They are just second hand devices. You can check if they are fine pretty easy and you need to take a look at the age (power on hours). I replace drives at 50k-60k hours, no matter if they are fine.