The care-and-feeding argument is absolutely legit, I have made several things over the years with RPi-s that were great until they weren't. Like an air quality monitor / logger which ran fine for a couple of years, until the sensor conked out, I replaced it with a turnkey one that's worked fine - though I am sure its sensor will also give up eventually, that's just the nature of them). Or a chiming clock that drove a servo to strike a doorbell chime, the little cheap hobby servos burned out after a couple years, bigger ones introduced more complicated power setups, and bashed the chime harder than was needed. But I also have a couple of Zero W-s which have been running fine for quite a while, the key for them, aside from simpler hardware, was the 'overlay file system' which loads into RAM only, so the sd cards don't get trashed writing logfiles etc.

You have perfectly described my approach to tech tasks that lack intrinsic joy or interest