Probably 95% of raspberry pis are sitting unused on a shelf, so it was was an excellent choice to make these boards lower cost w/ microSD cards.
You're probably buying consumer microSD cards. If you buy high endurance or industrial ones, they tend to be pretty reliable in my opinion; no less than a branded NVMe or SSD.
It’s not necessarily the SD that’s unreliable but the interface. I’ve had data corruption on SDs. Never with CFexpress for example.
It's not the SD card, it's the random powerloss from the janky chargers people used to power their raspberry pi that caused the SD card corruption. 99% of SD cards are used in battery powered devices with zero risk of power loss.
That's my experience as well, but the ones which have wear leveling are almost as expensive as SSDs and I only use them in devices which have no other storage option. For a new SBCs I would definitely prefer an SSD or NVMe drive.
I’m pretty much like that with most storage :-) Certainly when I come back from a trip any camera photos on an SD card get put into my photo cataloguing and backup system pronto.