Over the years I've seen plenty of warnings about this, but little, if any, proof of the problem actually happening.
I've written to 360K disks all the time in 1.2MB drives and rarely had any problems reading them again in 360K drives. The few times I did were with the old full-height drive in my IBM 5150 PC. I think (but have not been able to confirm) that the later half-height 360K drives used narrower heads to reduce the compatibility problem with reading data that had been written by 1.2MB drives.
Besides, these days with 5¼" floppy disks you're more likely to have problems with degradation of the media, fungus growing on the disk, dirty drive heads, drive mechanisms that need to be lubricated, etc. than any problems you can specifically blame on a 1.2MB drive writing to a 360K disk.
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