Pis can be supremely reliable when used correctly for the purpose. E.g. use high quality SD cards and don’t write to them much, or a good quality SSD if you have to do significant writes, use an official or better PSU, etc. My oldest 4 is from 2019 and it’s been in continuous use since then. It used to be a NAS running a 2-disk mirror exported over NFS. These days it’s a gigabit OpenWrt router with SQM. It’s still in the original SD card.
Pis can be supremely reliable when used correctly for the purpose. E.g. use high quality SD cards and don’t write to them much, or a good quality SSD if you have to do significant writes, use an official or better PSU, etc. My oldest 4 is from 2019 and it’s been in continuous use since then. It used to be a NAS running a 2-disk mirror exported over NFS. These days it’s a gigabit OpenWrt router with SQM. It’s still in the original SD card.