I've been running a raspberry 3 with a cheap sandisk sd card for years now without any SD Card issues. It runs a DNS based ad-blocker and a vpn.
I am logging everything to ram instead of writing it to the card and that's about it. I never encountered any issue with SD Card reliability, despite me sometimes just pulling the plug instead of properly shutting it down.
I do have a couple of other raspberries for other uses (e.g. a small rc car) which are also running on their first SD card. Might be just luck, but I do think that it's not necessary to go to extreme lengths to have them run reliably.
I am logging everything to ram instead of writing it to the card and that's about it. I never encountered any issue with SD Card reliability, despite me sometimes just pulling the plug instead of properly shutting it down.
Here is a simple guide: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/62536
I do have a couple of other raspberries for other uses (e.g. a small rc car) which are also running on their first SD card. Might be just luck, but I do think that it's not necessary to go to extreme lengths to have them run reliably.