I have not seen that yet DDR5, I think the signal integrity requirements are too high now to even have unused pads open. Most sticks don’t appear to have many traces at all on the top/bottom sides, just big power/ground planes.
Also with DDR5 each stick is actually 2 channels so you get 2 extra dies.
Presumably this is being marketed indistinguishably from regular ECC RAM?
If so, that's terrible news. It was already difficult enough to find ECC RAM for "workstation" class machines (i.e.: High end, non-server CPUs that support ECC such as AMD Threadripper).
It's not - ECC RAM still means real, between the RAM and CPU ECC. It's literally an extra 8 bits per channels, for an extra 16 bits per dim. 40 bits vs 32.
Also with DDR5 each stick is actually 2 channels so you get 2 extra dies.