Early on Raspbian didn't specify noatime or even relatime; every time something was read off disk, a write happened.

Let alone things like putting /var/tmp and/or /var/log in RAM, or long commit intervals.

No idea what the current situation is; Pis are too dear for the likes of me now.

> Early on Raspbian didn't specify noatime or even relatime; every time something was read off disk, a write happened.

relatime is a default for a while now, like decade+, you don't need to set up mount option just to get relatime