RPis are great hobby electronics projects, but IMO they don’t have any benefit for this kind of use over a thin client?

They’re more expensive, you need an extra RPi enclosure and power supply, you can’t use M.2 SSD sticks without an additional USB3 enclosure, they have a history of corrupting flash cards, and their idle power is only a little bit lower.

Can confirm about MicroSD flash cards, they're too unreliable for stuff that must be on 24/7, and get corrupt easily. Good for tinkering projects and media players, not for critical stuff where the downtime needed to pull the card and fsck/reinstall it might not be an option.

I've been running a weather website on a RPi2 since 2014. And it's on the same SD card. MicroSD cards don't get corrupted as much as the interwebz says they do.

It has probably to do with the number of unmanaged power cycles. A hobby electronics project will see many of those. A weather station may only see them when the power in the neighbor goes down.

For something critical, especially one which already involves an external drive, there is zero reason to store your root fs on an SD card. Booting using other methods has been supported for literally years.

I feel ya. My RPi does indeed have a case, with a fan. The backups are offloaded to an external HDD.

I use a Synology now but I used a Pi for a couple of years before that without issue.

I did give it to my daughter to use at university but I very much doubt she actually used it and I've not thought about asking until this post :^)

That seems pretty similar to this, just swapping out the thin client and pi (and the exact Linux distro, if that matters). Which makes it a trade in all the particulars:), depending on exact price, power use, etc.