This is the best technical review of omarch in my opinion. For info on the developer and his ideology you gotta go elsewhere tho.

i think i’ve managed to get to this state exactly once, but i don’t remember how i got there and what machine it was. i just know that it was a machine i tried multiple distros on and so i can confidently say that, in my case, it was not a hardware, but a software issue. i hope that nothing of value is broken for you either. good luck!

one where i mess up the breadboard and fry my cables/ microcontroller i guess

afaik that depends on the type of medium, where ssd are more susceptible to rot than hdd (and never use usb sticks). now this is just my guess, but i’d think that zfs with frequent automatic checks and and such will keep your data safer than an unplugged hdd