I see flash drives and SD cards as just more planned obsolesence in our consumerist society.
Yeah they have their advantages for fast boot times, and gaming, but they cannot be trusted to hold anything very long. Plus with repeated usage, and normal filesystem journalling, they can degrade pretty damn fast.
HD drives maybe slow but they are at least designed to hold data for a long time.
Im sure I will swap out my system flash drive in other year or two when it seizes.
SD cards? I refused to work with them at $dayjob :) I have made our little machines boot from ethernet instead and run entirely in RAM. flash sticks on USB range from amazingly good to amazingly horrible. It's just that if you find a good one, it's sold out the next day and you won't find the same stuff ever again.
I have made good experiences with business grade SSDs and NVMe RAM. However I do mistrust the ever smaller structures. And I blame the bad experiences with sdCards mainly on their physical size and their thermal non-design together with my use case. I most often write a complete image of an operating system onto them. And they never last much longer than maybe two or three years.