Strong agreement on the config backup, and let me put a number on why it matters more than the wear question.
I have had a boot device fail. Total downtime was about forty minutes: install to the replacement, import the config, import the pool, done. Everything came back including shares, users and scheduled tasks.
Someone I know had the same failure with no config export. He got his data back — the pool was fine — but he rebuilt every share, every dataset permission, every user and every scheduled job from memory over a weekend, and was still finding missing pieces a month later.
Same hardware failure. The difference was one exported file.