Meanwhile, if you go to a professional electronics component vendor like Mouser or Newark, a SwissBit "pseudo-SLC" micro-sd card is over $50 for 32 GB. I'm pretty sure that is real industrial usage quality, and will have similar longevity to a "real SSD" of similar size. (I also got one of these, it works well so far, but that's not a conclusive test yet :)
I guess I could instead get the 512 GB "Sandisk Extreme" whatever, and the additional size will probably give similar longevity? It just seems silly, and a bit less of a sure thing, than the priced-as-expected industrial thing. It is kinda strange/annoying that in the consumer side of the market, they keep adding superlatives, but it seems like the same cheap flash for the same cheap price? The real stuff surely costs more than $16, but it's not on the consumer market, at all.
And why doesn't the Raspi foundation/company sell some of the high-priced industrial stuff, just to make it an obvious option, even if not for most people? If you're just messing around and learning, use the cheap one, but if you want a raspi to do real work for more than 4 months straight, you're gonna want one of these real industrial SD cards. I guess most people who care about storage use m.2 adapters, which you might want for the performance, or the better pricing at higher capacity. But if you don't need the performance or capacity, or don't have room for the m.2 in your application, and just need the damn thing to not break ... the real "extreme" does exist, it is the SwissBit.