I feel you, been there. :) I now use Gentoo on my Pi and it is stable, but I can't recommend that to anyone who is not already used to Gentoo, it's challenging to install it by itself.

Regarding the SD card, I have no problem anymore since I stopped using the cheapest brands. I now use only Sandisk Ultra microSDXC, and the oldest ones have been working for four years without issue. It's still basically a NAND (same stuff than in SSD drives) soldered on pins, though, so it's very fragile. Care should be taken to neve bend them : they look flexible, but the NAND really isn't.

It's also a good idea to backup the whole card. As they usually weight way less than hard drives, it's easy to backup on your system and flash them back, mounting the sdcard on your desktop/laptop:

lsblk # find the device name, let's say it's mmcblk1 
dd if=/dev/mmcblk1 of=./backup-file bs=1G  # making a backup
dd if=./backup-file of=/dev/mmcblk1 bs=1G  # restoring the backup

if means "input file", of means "output file" and bs is the buffer size (how many bytes are copied at once, the more the faster, but it will use that amount or RAM at each iteration). dd is just copying input to output, bs bytes by bs bytes.

If you do that regularly, even using cheap sdcard that fail after a year will be less of a setback : you can just flash the last saved version of the system on a new card. It's probably better, though, to keep only the OS on the sdcard, and store important daily updated data on a usb drive or key.