Yeah, one is easier and the other is right. Shipping a reproducibly built readonly rootfs image takes longer, but is strictly better than putting 'some' versions of Debian packages on the SD card and calling it a day.

It's the Arduino curse - sure, it's faster to ship Hello World with Arduino but soon you realize all your libraries were built by beginners and use delay() everywhere so you're screwed if you need two peripherals to work at once.

You use Pi for prototypes and one-offs, not where you need to ship something that's actually competitive on BoM.

These days you can make anything have a readonly rootfs by using overlayfs. Just wipe your overlay partition to do a factory reset.

> something that's actually competitive on BoM.

Some applications are profitable at only hundreds of devices deployed. In which case, the moment you say "BoM" the hardware bill triples.

If you ship thousands to millions, of course you're right.