I find the lifetime effort of an AVR/ESP8266/ESP32 to be lower than a Pi.
I’ve had AVRs (of mine) running in the house for 9+ years without being touched (and ESPs for over 5).
Things do just work out of the box on them (often easier than installing Raspian, getting it onto wifi, setting up ssh, looking up the commands to set a GPIO, figuring out cron, rc.d, etc.)
It’s way faster IME to just use the Arduino digital_write() functionality in setup and loop. (I’m a long-time c/c++ programmer, which helps a bit.) The exploitable footprint is way lower, so you pretty much never need to do a security patch. If the power fails, you’ll never* end with a bad volume; it just boots back from flash and resumes working.
There's a lot of stuff you can do to Linux on the Pi to make it have some of the nice qualities you're describing.
I've set up my Buildroot project to copy "authorized_keys" and "wpa_supplicant.conf" from the fat32 formatted boot partition to their normal locations. So I flash an SD card, drag and drop the files onto the SD card, plug it in the Pi and SSH right in.
With regards to filesystem corruption on power failure, you can mount the root filesystem as read-only. If you need to write to files you could mount a tmpfs volatile filesystem.
