The problem is that SD cards were designed for portable storage of photos and music, which is a completely different use case than running an OS or database on

The problem is that SD cards were designed for portable storage of photos and music, which is a completely different use case than running an OS or database on top of them. They're being asked to do something they were not designed for, and then people get upset about it. They make high-endurance SD cards that have the same (or better) reliability as SSDs. These are what should be used in any Raspberry Pi that does some non-trivial amount of writing to the disk. Or boot from USB or Ethernet.