

It counts as long as barriers are on
External drives expect you to ensure writes complete first. If you don’t then smart software with copy-on-write and consistency checks can survive power loss (at the cost of losing recent changes). Other software which assumes a reliable drive can get wrecked.
Lots of file systems can not handle random power losses because they don’t force continous integrity of the disk file system, that’s why FAT formatted drives so often get corrupted
You can start with timed bans, so they get the point