One of my main concerns about the use of a raspberry pi as a desktop PC is microSD card write lifespan. microsd cards were not meant to be used as the boot disk for a live operating system. The amount of times you can write over one sector on them, and the write wear leveling algorithms, are much worse than even a $45 consumer grade SATA3 interface SSD.

Yes you can now boot a raspberry pi from an external usb3.0 hard drive or SSD in an enclosure. But how many people actually do that?

I would say that a huge percentage of failures I have seen of raspberry pis, when people attempt to turn them into low cost industrial/embedded/dedicated purpose headless machines, is from the microsd card failing after 6, 12, 18 months.

something like the raspberry pi but with a socket to plug in a cheap M.2 SATA or M.2 NVME SSD is needed.