It might be the Pi wearing out the SD card. The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 [1] actually has a PCIe Gen 2 x1 socket.
Jeff Geerling (who's active on HN) has actually gotten SATA working [2] through the Compute Module 4 and the Compute Module 4 IO Board [3].
If you go his route you could potentially set up a Pi with more durable storage. Although, if you watch Jeff's video its a PITA getting SATA working as he had to recompile the kernel with SATA support. Also its pretty hard to get the Compute Module 4 and the IO board at the moment.
Alternatively you go PXE boot and network storage but then that assumes that you've got something else running to provide it. It's a nice solution when you've got half a dozen Pis around though (we use it in labs for our hardware test setups).
The new Home Assistant Yellow board even has a built-in M.2 M-key slot for NVMe storage; there are some other boards out there with built-in slots too (I especially like the BitPiRat I recently tested: https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/boards_cm/mirkos-bitpirat-com...
Jeff Geerling (who's active on HN) has actually gotten SATA working [2] through the Compute Module 4 and the Compute Module 4 IO Board [3].
If you go his route you could potentially set up a Pi with more durable storage. Although, if you watch Jeff's video its a PITA getting SATA working as he had to recompile the kernel with SATA support. Also its pretty hard to get the Compute Module 4 and the IO board at the moment.
[1]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-4-io-boa...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSx1BRwz1bs
[3]: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/compute-module-4/