- Cheap cards would start corrupting right in the middle of first "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade";
- SanDisk Extreme Pro 16GB fared much better, but still we had several failures after half-a-year;
- Failure mode in both cases - corruption in superblocks and inodes, journal doesn't help much when recovering (we use ext4).
As a result, we settled on splitting each card into two root partitions - active and standby. To upgrade, overwrite standby one with dd, switch active/standby by editing /boot/cmdline.txt, and reboot.
People unplug those things without shutting them down correctly.... quite possibly that was the problem, nothing inherent to FLASH or SD cards.
So to answer your question, space wasn't a premium, and because of the technical and human limitations of SDHC vs SDXC. I'm sure some of those cameras had firmware updates that would add SDXC support, but we didn't need it.