Plug it into a monitor or TV and keep an eye on the console.
I have an older NUC that will not cooperate with certain brands of NVMe drive under PVE…the issue sounds like yours where it would work for an arbitrary amount of time before crashing the file system, attempting to remount read-only and rendering the system inert and unable to handle changes like plugging a monitor in later, yet it would still be “on”.
You would go for a Raspberry Pi when you need something it was invented for.
Putting a computer on your motorcycle or robot or solar powered RV. Super small space or low-low power availability things, or direct GPIO control.
A MiniMicro will run laps around a Pi for general compute, but you can’t run it off a cell phone battery pack. People only related Pis to general compute because of the push to sell them as affordable school computers, not because they were awesome at it, because they were cheap and just barely enough.