Raspberry Pi OS is solid; that’s the first kernel I reconfigured and recompiled myself and the first OS I felt comfortable making more major changes and at this point, it’s basically fully designed for the abilities and limitations of a Pi. But there are many distros you can check that have made an effort to work specifically with the Pi. I concentrate now on with the Zeros and Beagles with low eMMC is getting a very solid and fast sd card to run off off and keep a clean copy.
Weirdly, I’ve really gotten into sdcards as drive; I finish my configuration and get it how I want, then make an image and either back it up or put it on a backup card; no downtime I mess anything up or need to reinstall, just switch cards (or move the card from one Pi to the other). I was thinking that might be convenient for you too; once you get a solid configuration done and your programs loaded and ready to run, you copy it and keep some backups on extra cards. Like yes, nvme and ssd and usb and eMMC are much faster but they are not convenient when it’s Thing That Has This Very Specific Job where all I have to do is whip out my backup card, switch it out, and keep going.
I am so weirdly curious about what you decide to go with and why. This is one of the uses of SBCs I always thought was the most obvious: field work, especially if it’s impractical to go over network or testing/data checks are intensive and need direct contact.