On my Pi's I get about 1 write per second and that is virtually all log writes. They could be eliminated but honestly, if you are using decent SD-cards with plenty of space, you are very unlikely to ever hit the write limit these days.
Cheap cards and small cards just aren't worth it. The cheap ones die depressingly regularly and small cards don't give the system enough headroom to spread the writes over the whole card. A 32Gb Samsung Evo or Evo Pro is still cheap and plenty good enough.
You should also take care with power though. Make sure the Pi has enough power and try not to cut power to it without shutting down first. I have mine, along with my other networking gear, on a PC UPS.
I really think that you are swapping one set of issues for another. Why burden your Pi with Hassio if you don't really need it.
On a bare Raspbian, all you need to do is to run Dave's install script then install Mosquitto the standard way. You don't need to mess with Docker which is completely overkill. The standard install takes a few minutes, most of which is spend waiting for the Pi to do compiles/installs. There is almost no user input needed.
My Pi's aren't typically CPU bound but they do get memory bound quite easily. InfluxDB in particular can hog memory if your databases and writes creep up. Once you start getting memory swap, then you can get some serious spikes in usage thanks to the slow write speed of the SD-Card interface.
I completely agree.
Also, it is trivial to run multiple instances of Node-RED if you install locally rather than globally.
I don't deny that Docker has its uses but it has its own learning curve and its own issues that will trip up people who aren't used to it.
I've also used Ansible on my Pi's but found that it, too, really wasn't worth the effort.
Rebuilding my Pi is easy. As long as I remember which system files I've changed - I make sure they are all backed up so that is also easy. Reinstalling the whole system only takes a few minutes of my actual time though perhaps an hour of Pi time.
