Adrian Tuddenham wrote
The Natural Philosopher wrote

Ergo these days we rectify, smooth and chop and transform at much
higher freqs than 50hz to get power at different voltages or to achieve
current limiting. And that gets rid of 100hz flicker too..or should,

The flicker will only disappear if you use a large capacitor as
a storage element; usually this is found on the HV side of the
inverter. This brings back the reliability problem: it is asking
a lot of a big capacitor to survive for many years

PC power supplys done like that last fine.

when it is potentially exposed to occasional
mains glitches from one side

It isnt hard to stop those getting to the cap.

and continuously exposed to the
switching current waveform on the other.

That doesn’t happen either with the big cap.

For a given energy storage capacity, capacitors are smaller,
lighter and cheaper than metal-cored chokes, but it is a lot
more difficult to make them as reliable in the long term.

Yes, but in practice its long term enough with PC power supplys.