Bigger USB stick = more durable?

There is no connection. It depends on how well the storage hip is made or the entire stick is processed.

Often, the disk of memory chips is installed in cheap USB sticks and the broken memory areas are blocked or the chip is clocked down so far that most of the time works properly.

So you can buy very large or very small sticks that are already “caputt” from work and then fall out completely.

With an SSD, that’s different, they have “Wear Leveling”. Flash memory can be read without wear, but takes damage when describing and cannot do this very often.

The computer reads and describes logical sectors and the SSD converts them into physical addresses. If a write command comes to a logical sector and the physical sector has been described many times, the SSD switches to another physical sector that has been described less often.

While on a memory card and a normal USB stick the same sectors are described, for example, that of a folder until the breaks, an SSD exchanges the physical sectors so that wear is distributed over the entire memory when writing. The more space is unused, the more effective the wear leveling becomes.

Ideally, you leave at least 10% free when partitioning the hard drive so that the SSD always has many fresher sectors available for exchange.

With USB STicks, wear leveling is the absolute exception.