There is merit to it, mainly in high speed applications. When you got up to 48x and 52x speeds, an imbalance could result in a catastrophic failure of the material and the disk could lose structural integrity… aka it can explode.

For audio… Not so much. Since audio always ran at 1x speed. Any disk imbalances would be trivial to the ability for the player to read the disk.

I remember when I converted a bunch of CDs to mp3, the “ripping” program would give errors if it was trying to read too quickly, it would result in those slips and cirps you could hear on some mp3 files. Those were literally read errors from when the data was extracted from the original media… though, it could also be imperfections in the disk, or scratches. I ran mine at… IIRC 4x to ensure there were few, if any, read errors. Sure, it took between 10 and 20 minutes to extract all the tracks from a CD, but I didn’t get any audio issues that were so common in early mp3 files.

I imagine that if I had this and used it on the disks for a minute before ripping them to mp3, I could have run it at 8-16x or more with no loss in quality.

For data applications, there’s read checking (CRC) to ensure data integrity. If there’s a read error, the drive will just retry, slowing down as required to ensure the data is consistent. This is why your CD/DVD drive spins up and down while reading data during something like a file copy off of a disk. Eliminating the need to re-read the data can significantly increase the speed of a copy operation.

The disk shaver did work, it was just marketed poorly. For 1x CD reads, it was generally useless.