Totally agree about using relatime/noatime mount options and using tmpfs wherever it's sensible. But if you want to take control of your $HOME, it probably makes sense to mount it separately. Putting ~/.cache on tmpfs will lose thousands of useful cache files every time you reboot (hitting performance, but also causing more reads eg. to larger original files), possibly consume gigabytes of memory, and should IMHO be avoided. Getting paranoid about disk wear on a 2yo laptop is perhaps a bit exaggerated.

Talking about desktop Linux, I (and my family) and workplace colleagues all run Kubuntu systems on SSD's continuously since 2012 - that's 8 years of continuous disk wear and counting. We're talking about 3 laptops and 5 desktops, several of them mdadm RAID0 (on 2-3 disks), all Ext4, and NO swap partitions (warning, this may lead to occasional crashes due to OOM situations, though that's going to improve soon hopefully). Three of these systems are heavy usage workstations, 5 of them have one or more VMs running, all of these systems are backed up to external USB2/3 disks via Timeshift [0] since 2012 (VM disk images are backed up separately). A few critical directories are shared via cloud, which thus also acts as a backup tool. All disks are periodically health checked via smartmontools. This in my experience maximizes performance (thanks to Ext4 and RAID0), while keeping stuff safe (thanks to backups). IMHO desktop systems don't need the kind of online redundancy provided by other RAID levels, and restoring a full system (including grub, on an mdadm system) from a Timeshift snapshot, which I did multiple times already, has always been a breeze.

Among the ~10 SSD corruption events I witnessed in this decade, I could track ~half down to a failing PSU or a bad SATA cable, though I had a couple disks abruptly die too (one NVME M.2 drive probably had thermal issues). Still, IMHO none was caused by wear.

relevant smartctl output for one of my desktop SSDs:

  9 Power_On_Hours_and_Msec 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       12726h
  241 Host_Writes_32MiB       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       623690
  249 NAND_Writes_1GiB        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       23897

So, ~24 Tb written so far...

[0] https://teejeetech.in/