I used dietpi [1] for similar reasons: a slim version of Debian, and with the defaults set to push all the logging into ram to minimize writes. Dietpi has opinionated defaults, for sure, but it's easy to choose something else (e.g. Dropbear is the default ssh server, but bumping to OpenSSH is a matter of changing a setting in the handy config tool).

I've been running an RPi3 on dietpi on an SD card as my secondary PiHole instance on it for at least a year with no issues.

[1] https://dietpi.com/