I did a bunch of research on this a while back and the conclusion I found was: yes, but buy name-brand better rated cards to avoid cheapo cards that do not do wear leveling or do it very badly.
It's nowhere near as good as SSD drives, but it's better than just a naked flash chip... unless I'm wrong.
Even the brand name cards aren't worth shit; you need to buy "industrial" cards.
Source: tried to get a root filesystem to work on name brand SD cards for a high availability product.
How much abuse was your high availability product delivering to these cards in terms of writes? Was it something like a video recorder, database, cryptocurrency, or some other application that did large amounts of write I/O?
I ask because we're about to ship something that uses SD cards, but the I/O is very low. It's a network appliance and doesn't do anything locally that is high write throughput.
We even saw SD cards screwing up in RO mode in fact, from major brands. Trust me, you want to swap out for an industrial card in your BoM.
One would have expected this to be an area of focus for RasPi developers? Surely some driver could be updated to avoid this?
This talk about SD cards is really great and explains some of this:
Part of the problem is that even if you only write 1GB per day the card is highly likely to reuse the same sectors over and over.