I played around with Pis a lot in the OG Pi 1B era and yeah, I got tired of fixing it every couple months (I attribute this to power quality and SD card failures) and just moved to using various x86 based systems. I used surplus SFF optiplexes from surplus sales (paid as little as $5 for some), AM1-based mITX (mobo+CPU for $50!), or Atom-based NUCs (used to get "surplus" J5005 NUCs with the plastic still on for $125).

I'm looking to get back into it with some Pi4s for a few things - but I'm planning to PXE boot this time around to try and sidestep the SD card/power problems. Basically just stuff like LibreElec to free up some of my J5005 NUCs for actual stuff.