YMMV, that's why I stressed "in my experience". I'm aware some people find them rock solid, I'm just not one of those people.
I have docker containers running on my local app server that I literally never think about and have been humming away without issue for years (aside from server restarts or updates which I rarely need to do and it's often as easy as a `docker pull`). That's what I'm looking for, if it requires any more interaction then I'd rather pay more. I'm not saying "my time is worth so much" exactly, it's not like every hour of my day is packed full and I couldn't do some more server admin but I don't want to do that. I have the money (which isn't really all that much more) to avoid it so I do.
It's the same way that in my early 20's I cobbled together local storage servers full of shucked hard drives to save money and now I pay for a Synology and raw drives. I just don't want to spend my free time doing that anymore.
The care-and-feeding argument is absolutely legit, I have made several things over the years with RPi-s that were great until they weren't. Like an air quality monitor / logger which ran fine for a couple of years, until the sensor conked out, I replaced it with a turnkey one that's worked fine - though I am sure its sensor will also give up eventually, that's just the nature of them). Or a chiming clock that drove a servo to strike a doorbell chime, the little cheap hobby servos burned out after a couple years, bigger ones introduced more complicated power setups, and bashed the chime harder than was needed. But I also have a couple of Zero W-s which have been running fine for quite a while, the key for them, aside from simpler hardware, was the 'overlay file system' which loads into RAM only, so the sd cards don't get trashed writing logfiles etc.
Mine runs the Unifi controller and PiHole on a Pi 3 and it has survived, untouched, across four separate moves. Helps to properly tune logging to not over-wear the SD card.
My three Orange Pi 5's are in my home k8s cluster (mostly as local GitHub Actions arm64 builders, but also have m.2 storage for Longhorn and run the occasional one-off) will probably tick along without being looked at again for years.
I have docker containers running on my local app server that I literally never think about and have been humming away without issue for years (aside from server restarts or updates which I rarely need to do and it's often as easy as a `docker pull`). That's what I'm looking for, if it requires any more interaction then I'd rather pay more. I'm not saying "my time is worth so much" exactly, it's not like every hour of my day is packed full and I couldn't do some more server admin but I don't want to do that. I have the money (which isn't really all that much more) to avoid it so I do.
It's the same way that in my early 20's I cobbled together local storage servers full of shucked hard drives to save money and now I pay for a Synology and raw drives. I just don't want to spend my free time doing that anymore.