Over the last couple of days I tested multiple CD drives and multiple different CDs via the tool system speed, which for example can be found in Phils Dos Benchmark pack over here:
https://www.philscomputerlab.com/dos-benchmark-pack.html

Several drives seem to read CDs as following

In this example the drive speed was limited to 1200 via CDBQ.
It does encounter an Critical Error Zone. I had very similar results with other CDs and other drives. Not all of them, but I'd say its the majority. So I am wondering what that actually means. Maybe it's just a fluke? I mean it seems more or less consistent. When the drive was tested at full speed, I didnt get the error message, but there was a short drop into the error Zone at the end as well.

The drive otherwise works beautifully. Very silent even at 1200.
I assumed that maybe it has problem reading some files. So I just copied over the whole CD via DOS Navigator. And indeed close to the end I got errors. However, if I just kept retrying whenever an error occured it worked (maybe around 10 times).
So what does that mean? is that maybe even normal or a driver issue?