My question more specifically is would erasure encoding be more likely to protect data that is backed up to let’s say a local hard drive or SSD as compared to the cloud with Google Drive?
Does Google Drive use technology to reduce the risk of a bad chunk from occurring as compared to the risk of a bad chunk showing up on my local spinning HD for Duplicacy backups?
I’m looking at this from a cost / benefit perspective. I already have data backed up with no erasure coding.
I would assume so. I haven’t yet implemented erasure coding with my backups, but I plan to change my local storage to enable it and to keep Google Drive as is.
I can’t imagine a situation where Google isn’t using ECC on their servers, or some kinda redundancy on their storage arrays. I mean, with the millions of people that use their services - including YouTube etc. - I don’t know of situations where data/video has been found to be suddenly corrupted. 
Can you imagine that? CRC on a YT video… and boy, there’s a lot of videos…