I have a rasperry pi 2 and 4 that have been running on the same size uSD (reputable brand) for 5 years and haven’t had any issues. I have swap turned off. You just have to be aware of the i/o and not do anything stupid. Clearly for heavy i/o with multitasking they are not ideal.
You can buy cards that support SMART if you want to track wear, but they are expensive.
My 3 Pis have destroyed 6 SD cards. One of them also somehow drew too much power when trying to boot and got so hot it burnt me and melted itself but that could have been the power supply. I know the 4s and 5s can blow SD cards if you run them without heatsinks.
What I'm saying is, your anecdotal evidence of two pis doesn't justify saying we did something wrong with the configuration. In my experience raspberry pis still behave like "throwaway devices" but their price tags do not justify it anymore.