Is there an alternative to flash that does not wear out, or where it is practically eliminated? Or could such be developed?
I wonder, for example, about battery backed RAM combined with flash, so that changes are written to RAM and then written to Flash on a schedule, with anti-wear algorithms and location mapping. And when the battery gets low, the whole lot gets written to Flash and the device goes readonly, with alarms and error indications. It would have multiple batteries for redundancy and charge them from the host device.
My old employer, Psion, used to sell all-RAM battery backed storage devices that were removable. Some of them could corrupt the data of a modification was in progress when you pulled them out, which was not good at all. should have been transactional and had internal intelligence it that would have cost an absolute fortune. Later systems had a door / cover over the storage modules which gave some warning that the device might be removed. They also sold lots of very reliable flash and in the early days, even eprom devices, before flash was available. The EPROMs were blown by 21V which was a colossal mistake because they all changed to 12V iirc and that then needed to be cut back down. So it turned 9V into 21V and then threw half of it away again.