Brilliant work, my initial thoughts are that it might be significantly less work to patch/seal/address the leaks in the hull than to engineer, build, install, monitor the electronics for this. Is this not the case?
Might seem like overkill where regular maintenance should be sufficient but you can never have too many redundancies to keep a boat afloat. Murphy's Law very much applies.
And there is maintenance. Even if you seal up all of the leaks, something will always degrade and start leaking. If you are away from the boat for weeks at a time, you may find your leak-free boat on the bottom of the harbor.
So yes, you could conceivably find and seal every single leak, especially if you don't have a rotating shaft that penetrates the hull, but it would not negate the need for monitoring.
Connection to your comment: there was a huge explosion in Beirut. There were safety issues with a ship loaded with fertilizer. The port offloaded the fertilizer and let the crew leave. One consequence was the terrible explosion. The other was that before that the ship sank. Big ships are described in the podcast as needing constant maintenance to keep them from sinking, which is one of the reasons ports are reluctant to let the crew leave.
Seems like it's similar for much smaller boats.
There are always bugs (leaks) and potential for bugs (leaks), some effort in both directions is usually a better use of time (and in this case, money).