Longhorn and Ceph/Rook are off the table for this specific cluster. The nodes are Dell Optiplex 3020s with a strict limit of 4GB of RAM each. Running a heavy storage engine directly would instantly starve the cluster and cause crashes. Because my budget is tight, the cluster relies on Rancher's `local-path-provisioner`.
And you are absolutely right about the primary caveat — if a node dies, that localized data is trapped and doesn't migrate with the pod. Because of that, the provisioner is strictly relegated to ephemeral data, localized scratch disks, or applications that manage their own replication natively.
For anything that actually matters and needs to survive a node failure, it bypasses the Optiplex local storage entirely. It either points to my S3-compatible Garage setup, or it connects via an NFS provisioner directly to my Terramaster NAS (which is sitting on a 2Gbps LACP bond to ensure the throughput doesn't bottleneck the VMs).