I’m not sure what kind of money you want to spend? The M2 Hat is ~$14 USD and a 2242 NVME SSD can be had for ~$30-$40 USD since you don’t care as much about performance.
The USB to SATA adapter is going to run ~$10 USD and the SATA SSD drives are going to start ~$20 USD are go up from there depending on size, performance, etc.
If size of storage is an issue, the SATA SSD is probably the better route. I believe the NVME would be better performance since it utilizes the bus on the Pi more fully.
I would guess that for the money, most M2 drives and SATA SSD drives are going to be similar lifespans
I just upgraded to the 2024.10.1 version and I’m not currently having any issues with my Rheem Econet integration. I have nothing about it in my logs that I can see. Let me know if there’s something specific you want to see.