I thought this was what RAID was designed to prevent. I don't know what a cable failure would look like in my setup in practice, but I would think the disk would start failing parity checks against the rest of the array and be flagged as bad.
ZFS is really designed for end-to-end integrity. Once you're stored data on ZFS, you're basically guaranteed that you'll always get the exact same thing back (or an error)... no matter where in the "chain" of I/O the failure occurred.
Using more spindles you could get more performance out of a bunch of cheap disks, and to help with the fact that these cheap disks failed more often, you made them redundant.
In general, dealing with data corruption that does not generate an error is not within the purview of RAID implementations. ZFS and btrfs handle it because they're more than just RAID implementations. mdadm can do similar things in a RAID setup if dm-integrity is used on all of the drives (but it is not used by default when just setting up mdadm/lvm/etc.)