Tor's original post mentioned wheelsets with too few spokes in, laced to rims that are not strong enough. Such wheels fail often enough but if they are used by a strong, heavy, enthusiastic rider in all weathers, they are very likely to be insufficiently reliable.
The spoke tensions tend to be higher than in other wheels, and thus the local rim loadings and fatigue loadings are too. Winter road salt very greatly lowers the stress threshold at which cracks will propagate in the rim, so this is exactly what happens.
I have seen dozens of wheels (very many different makers of wheel and/or rim) with cracked rims. In every case the wheels were built too light for the task in hand.
They would have lasted longer if they had been better protected from corrosion; there's not much point in applying an anodising treatment to the rim if you then breach it by drilling holes for the spokes right through it; this creates the perfect storm of
- a crevice to retain a pool of ever-strengthening brine
- a perfect site for corrosion to attack, with no coating on it
- the very highest stresses
all in the same place! Genius!
It is also the case that if a single spoke breaks in a minimally-spoked wheels, the wheel is less likely to be rideable.
On the other side of the argument there seems to be an appetite for conflating 'wheels with more spokes in' with 'heavy wheels' or 'slow wheels'. What utter pish! The lightest and nicest-riding wheels I own have lots of spokes in; I also own several sets of minimally spoked wheels, which have almost without exception shown themselves to be heavier, less reliable, and less comfortable to ride on (yes even with the same tyres). Their sole advantage is aerodynamic, and that advantage is relatively slight.
It is my earnest belief that the main reason people buy minimally spoked wheelsets is because they are swayed by fashion; the mindless scribes in various cycling journals don't help either....
Oh, and no-one should be surprised that any lightweight wheel is nicer to ride on that one fitted with a heavy tyre like a Marathon.
cheers