IPA as an alcohol is not ionised, so it is not acidic or alkaline, and will not corrode tape heads or lenses.
as for commercial cd cleaning disks, yes that is the regular way for the majority. however as a tech minded user, like all readers here, i want to be very sure the lens is really clean, to rule out other causes. i do somewhat distrust the claimed cleaning ability of such products using dry brushes.
when a cd drive cannot read a cd it can be due to a host of factors, like laser alignment, aging or dead laser, bad cd etc.