Not related to USB, but flash storage quality in general varies a lot.

We have a few hundred Raspberry Pi in operation at customer sites, running 24/7. Back when we started our business we used generic Micro SD (can't remember the brand). They would fail after 2-6 months. This was a big hassle. We have customers all over Germany and would need to ship them a complete RPI as a replacement, as the customers are usually not tech-savvy enough to just replace the SD.

We now use SanDisk's "Industrial" Micro SD and haven't had this problem since.

Also, reducing writes to the SD is certainly a good idea. Ideally - if you can - mount the system as read only.