I tried using Linux alternatives to iTunes, but it was always a pain. Even iTunes itself on a separate windows box was more of a hassle than I wanted. I eventually discovered rockbox, which works great with my iPod (5th gen AKA video): it has way more config options and allows me to simply create .m3u playlists and use my own folder structure. If your iPod is supported (https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/IpodPort.html), I’d absolutely recommend Rockbox over other solutions.
If your iPod isn’t supported by Rockbox (like my nano 5th gen), you could probably use strawberry or GTKpod. Both are imperfect, but work “good enough”.
I believe SSD’s don’t actually experience wear when reading data, only when writing. Loading more data from SSD’s shouldn’t cause any premature failure. Overwriting more data each update could cause the drive to fail slightly earlier, but if that’s really that big of a concern, you’d be best of moving to Debian stable (no updates means no SSD writes).
If SSD wear prevention is really that big of a concern, you might be interested in profile-sync-daemon (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Profile-sync-daemon). It reduces writes to hard drives by keeping your browser profile in RAM, and only periodically syncing it to disk.
Though I must add that SSD’s wearing out really isn’t that much of an issue with modern drives. With normal usage, a drive will become obsolete long before it actually wears out.