Software patches won't fix missing ECC.

Not really. You can add checksums or CRC to detect corruption after it happens, but you can’t correct it without redundancy—and that means duplicating memory and checking every read, which kills performance and complexity.

The core problem: Without ECC hardware, memory errors are silent. They corrupt a bit, your data is wrong, and no amount of software checks after the fact can know what the correct value was supposed to be. You’d need to store every value twice or more and compare them, like a very slow RAID for RAM. On a Pi-class board that’s already RAM-limited, that’s impractical.

For genuinely data-critical work (financial records, medical logs, scientific measurements), get a board with ECC support—like certain Rockchip RK3568 or x86 mini PCs that do support it. The RK3588 does not, and you can’t fix that in software.

Better to spend the extra fifty bucks on proper hardware than build a house of cards.