Journaling can have significant downsides when used with external flash storage including reduced performance and increased wear of the flash memory.

Not disputing your facts, but I've used journalled file systems in flash drives since forever and never had a performance issue that was not directly tied to the hardware, and most have lasted many years.

I prefer having to replace a cheap flash drive more frequently than to lose data altogether.

Of course, everybody's use case is different and tradeoffs need to be considered.