Those tend to be very safe hard resets from a drive perspective. First of all, you're not losing power, so even though there's a reset, the drive firmware maintained power. Secondly, I'm guessing you see far more hard locks and manual resets than random, sudden reboots - and if that's the case, then the drive firmware probably didn't even notice. By the time you press reset, an eternity has passed and any ongoing activities have long finished.

I can imagine a software-fault causing drive-level problems if the drive has a large cache and a broken fsync, or if the bios does some kind of unsafe hard drive reset very quickly after starting.

In any case, it's probably more likely to be file-system level reliability you'd need in the face of driver instability.