No normal use should wear out a drive in any sensible time in reasonable use and even in unreasonable use they seem to last almost indefinitely. There's more likely to be some other kind of component death before that.

Of course, in staged lab test, it's probably possible to burn one out. I've seen projects do that on memory cards and various *ROM chips but don't recall seeing someone kill SSDs. That would get costly. But I'm almost sure a web search would turn out someone doing that.

I also used to be sure that 90's SCSI HDDs would never really stop running. Just the machines using them became too much work and no utility to keep going. I remember only one of mine that wouldn't start after some years in the storage, but I managed to hammer it back into shape.

The ARM models tend to be very very very slow and small and have architectures that are obsoleted in many Linux distributions combined with hardware that's weird enough that NetBSD doesn't support it (e.g. LAN chip or SATA, which you might need in a NAS). And yes, looking at NetBSD pages and build configs is one avenue for finding well supported devices. Although the documentation isn't great or complete. Some models may also have weird boot sequences or rescue modes that are extra hassle.

I keep wondering if a neat little buildroot config would work with some of these devices. Other odd options would be https://armbian.com/boards and https://openwrt.org/supported_devices .