I’m always a retropie/emulation station person

I think the boogeyman of failing sd cards is mostly ridiculous. I’ve literally used micro sd cards in 24/7 Raspberry pis for 4-6 years straight no problem. Some of those with things like syncthing and a bot that constantly downloads YouTube videos, and others that capture and record data. I’ve absolutely never had an SD card fail in any device since I started using Pis in 2014.

Buy quality cards. My favorites have been the Samsung Evos, I have multiple that are still running and I haven’t bought a card in years, excepting a 128gb one for my switch.