tape-ism is a worldview. for instance, many people will say that it's not a real backup or archive if it's not offline (usually their justification is that mistake or malice can more easily kill an online "backup".) if you rarely recover from archive, that colors your expectations as well: you are rarely exercising the tape, so may have an unrealistic estimate of the actual, silent failure rate. obviously if you more frequently recover from archive, you'll be pained by tape's latency (probably offsite, but even libraries are slow relative to disk seeks.)
in reality, people who take tape seriously write two copies. once you plug that in - the price, the data rate, the space, and factor in environment-controlled storage, offsite of course, and the fact that tape drives are expensive and don't last very long, and normally need a separate spooling facility. wow, costs do pile up.
it can probably still work well for very large, very sparsely-accessed storage. most people don't bite, though, and online, spinning storage for backup and archive really is the norm. simply being able to verify all your data is a powerful argument.