@joerg_asma
Your overall reasoning to recommend RPi is fine, the major point is that it’s quick and cheap to replace.
But you’re seriously wrong on a number of details you gave - sorry to jump in.
No. In terms of Raspi stability, ANY supply to also provide what they are spec’ed to provide is fine.
Most of the time the problem is the user does neither know nor care to estimate their power needs and to buy an appropriate power supply.
But inadequate power supplies by themselves are greatly overestimated as a primary source of problems.
SD wearout is the by far more frequent and more dangerous threat to stability if you run on RPi.
No again. No in general they do not freeze. If yours does I’d assume you have faulty HW or it’s underpowered.
A HW watchdog is not required if you purely use the RPi as a server (i.e. no direct electrical control of whatever via GPIO, if you do that it might make sense) .
In fact watchdogs may even be harmful in the long run … it’s soooo convenient that you don’t have to care about monitoring - but that’s what prevents you from investigating what the real problem cause is!
Any boot cycle is a cycle too much. And depending on your device zoo, reinitializations on boot may take several minutes (OH outage!) and reboots also tend to exhibit new problems that were hidden before.
No again. There’s no ‘good’ or ‘good enough’ SD cards, they all fail sooner or later (and by that I mean within a relatively short timeframe where you could reasonably expect HW does not fail within).
To exchange them is a poor strategy, too. It does not guarantee your system won’t fail before next exchange. You waste work and money. And most important: you have to be disciplined enough to keep exchanging your cards for years. Only very few people are.
Best is to go ZRAM and take care of backups. Read the full story here.
On SSD they’re ok as an alternative to SD, but SSD speed is a nonsense argument. It’s irrelevant because storage access speed has negligible impact on OH performance.