I've been using RPIs since their first release and never had an SD card failure. Might just be luck though cause I know the problem is real and happens to many people.
It depends on the distro. What especially hammers SD cards on Linux, eventually rendering the card read-only, is logs being written to disk. A lot of distros for Raspberry Pi therefore now keep logs in RAM.
This issue is true of any flash memory. See my sibling comment on using an USB stick to write data: I also destroyed a bunch with logs
I destroyed many SD cards with the original Pi. I ended up putting the card read only with the hardware switch and use a USB stick for writing data. No issue with microSD cards with more recent Pis (or other SBC) however