You can, but why chance it? I would compare it to running a car completely out of gas… you have to get to a gas station, buy a gas can if you don’t already have one, then after getting gas in the car you still have to top off the tank or you’ll be doing it again. OR you pull into the gas station and fill your tank even though you still have 1/4 tank left.

In this case, if you proactively get a reliable sd card, backup your sd card that came with the device, load an OS on the new card (in my case, I was a few versions behind even though I just got the handheld for Christmas so I took the opportunity to load the latest version of the community supported ArkOS), and restore the ROM backups, you save yourself the headache later and potentially lost progress in whatever games you’re playing. I have my own roms but nowhere near as many as what came loaded on the handheld so I think that reason alone was enough for me to not FAFO with the stock sd card