You can directly boot a Pi from USB now with the Pi 4. Switch to a SSD and you won't worry about SD card corruption as much. The bigger issue is that you need to cleanly shutdown any embedded system instead of just yanking or hard cutting power--flash memory and filesystems need time to sync. The Pi is no more or no less susceptible to this problem.

Also you're comparing to a tablet, a device with a _built in battery_ that prevents hard power loss in 99% of circumstances. Just because you press the power button on your tablet does not mean it is immediately cutting power to the device. If you add a battery backup and soft power switch to the Pi you would be just as reliable as a tablet. If you remove the battery from a tablet and hard cut the power, you can just as easily corrupt its flash memory filesystem.

Oh no, an easily-replaceable $10 part will fail instead of having to pay a vendor thousands to replace an entire unit? What a problem.

Funny, do you have anything to back that up? Anecdotally, I have a 7 year old pi running my watering system and it hasn't skipped a beat in 7 years of being on 24/7. (current uptime is 1029 days).

I was going to post a similar response. From my direct experience all my Pi setups became corrupted within weeks or months. Admittedly it probably was caused by user turning off power mid-write or other preventable actions, but this is real life.

I'm excited to see the replies to your response that have some practical suggestions to prevent this.

Can't the Pi boot off a network?

…so it’s a good thing the part that wears out is the easiest thing in the world to replace, right?

So it will fail after the same length of time that a consumer tablet will keep ticking?

FWIW, I use an ipad to enter a code at my kids' pre-school. The screens are frequently messed up.

Cheap tablets use eMMC so they use the exact same storage technology with the same problems.