While they didn't use tried and proven method that's in raspi-config, it's not about skimping, it's a fundamental underlying change. Your expensive SD will eventually fail. It just will take longer than the cheap one. The question is, when will that be? If you use a read only technique, you don't have to guess.
True enough, but if something breaks with a read-only SD you are relying on logging to a cloud service.
So you reduce the chance of SD failure but introduce a risk of network failure. Of course, network failure doesn't have to be fatal but you won't have any logs to know what happened.
In my experience the chance of one of my Pi's not being able to access the network for one reason or another is much larger than a failed SD card, so I keep my logs on the card.
