[formerly_proven]

There's commercial options that work like this (and indeed those installations can more or less be updated and upgraded with new stuff decades down the line, we've been there, it's been done, and continues to be done) but that's the rub: it's commercial, it costs money, and the hardware involved is much more expensive than cheap IoT gadgets out of shenzen. Wanting the lowestest cost option to also have the longestest life and highestest reliability is of course something we would all want, but generally not how this reality is structured.