Why not? There are plenty of RPi enclosures that will bridge to USB and hold the SSD for you. For me, the cost of an RPi 8gb + enclosure + ssd + power is now close to the micro intel boxes.

It's both many times faster than booting from microSD, and unless you buy the absolute cheapest SSD from a no-name manufacture, many times more reliable.

Additionally, if you have a good power supply and don't write tons of data on a daily basis to the microSD card, it will be quite reliable as long as it's a name-brand, high quality card.

Source: I've deployed about 50 RPis in various conditions, all but two booting off microSD cards, and have only had one failure requiring swapping in a new microSD card, over the past 8 years of use.

Industrial microSD cards are especially robust and are now available from a variety of manufacturers with environmental and wear ratings that rival decent SSDs.

It's not so much about the SSD, but the USB cable being quite easy to unplug accidentally, though I suppose if you used something like one of those short Samsung Fit drives or a NVMe dock and had a custom enclosure that holds it in place after the Pi is screwed in, then maybe yeah.