> No it doesn't.

Yes it does.

> As a child, one time I tried to make a CD unplayable and literally couldn't do it. (Sandpaper didn't do the trick.)

Either child you was incompetent or your player was very good at error recovery, because I personally saw a number of car CDs thrown out as the car’s stereo was unable to read them anymore.

you were probably scraping the thick transparent side, not the side with the label? the data is immediately under the label. the clear side can be surprisingly scraped up and still read properly, though I'm not sure how!! I have some CDs that I thought were ruined because of how scratched up the underside is, and they play just fine. Pretty sweet! Then I have one or two where the label side got a scratch taken out of it, and indeed, you can see right through the disc at those points - unrecoverable damage. Conversely a scratched up underside can simply be buffed/polished smooth and the disc will read good as new. I actually have one disc that cracked in half (a singular crack from the center to the outside edge, not spanning the total diameter of the disc)... and it actually plays without any skips (though surely depending on quality of the player and its resilience to read errors). I couldn't believe it at the time. A single piece of masking tape to hold the edge together was a sufficient "repair".

They must’ve had a really robust kind of CDs wherever you lived, then. Like everyone else, I wore out a lot of discs simply by storing them outside their case.

CD goes in the microwave