Certainly, but there are other tradeoffs. You can write a byte to a replicated stripe, but encoded stripes either demand full-stripe writes or writing a byte is hilariously expensive. It's not clear in the blog if we are talking about sealed read-only data or what.
Practically all modern storage has a minimum sector write size; now commonly 4096 bytes for HDD and megabytes for NAND. Most systems with fancy erasure codes address this by gathering multiple writes into single stripes and are effectively append-only filesystems with garbage collection to support snapshots.
A large number of RS erasure codes are over GF(2^8) which could allow individual byte updates to a stripe for e.g. Octane as storage. Generally, of course, most filesystems checksum at a block level and so byte-writes are rarely going to be implemented as such.
Small correction I think. The 4KiB for HDDs is fairly new and afaik most NAND is going to also be 4KiB with the exception of QLC which last I saw had a 64KiB minimum sector write size. If you have a source that NAND flash is using MiB minimum sector size, can you point me to that link?
4k sectors for hard drives has been around since roughly 2010, depending on your specific drive. 512e drives are very common; if you do a write that's not 4k aligned, the drive will turn it into a read / modify / write cycle.
