The consensus on the web is to avoid writes on flash drives as much as possible to extend the life. Some early ones could handle only 10,000 writes.
Rewriting Flash drives, such as with defragmentation, is Not recommended at all.
New versions of flash drives will allow for more writes in the future significantly. But until then...
Agreed on all that, except that a re-write of the stick every couple years isn’t going to take much of a chunk out of a 10k re-write lifespan. :-)
I note that SLC holds up best, but is hard to find in USB sticks. OTOH, Samsung does make some micro-SD cards with SLC and considerably extended lifetimes for use in dashcams, trail cams, surveillance uses, and such. (Pro Endurance series, IIRC.)
OTOH, rewrites ARE a big factor in my wanting to get a M.2 SSD running as the OS and Programs drive in the N22. I actually have almost all the application programs installed on a 128 GB micro-SD card in the micro-SD card stock, because the eMMC storage C: drive is so limited. All these are fairly low overhead programs, so they actually run reasonably from there. BUT, re-writes with time become a concern, and, I have to use a card reader in one of the USB ports if I want to view files on another micro-SD card or transfer files from another micro-SD card into the N22.