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I thought that USB flash drives were not made to withstand the duty cycle required of system drives, and that's why SSDs cost more - because they have the hardware to transparently detect errors and remap them to a reserve set of locations.

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This is mostly true, things like truenas and routers(many ubiquiti edgerouters use usb flash drives as the system drive) get away with it by reducing writes. truenas only writes to the system drive when you make a configuration change. all logging is done on the data drives.

Honestly I am not sure why usb flash drives are so terrible. no market for good drives?

USB drives are fine, but they’re just made for a different use. You can spend money and get good ones, but super cheap ones exist so it’s safer to say “avoid”.

Truenas recommends SSDs since half a decade ago or so due to the high failure rate. The forums felt pretty flooded with posts about failed USB-drives for a while there, and even before that I switched to installing on a SSD since I got tired of having a triple-mirror USB-setup just to keep the system alive long enough to be able to replace them (system was located across town back then).

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