I configured a Ramdisk to extend the life of the SD card.
After that, when I upgraded the kernel with apt, an error occurred because /var/tmp did not have enough capacity.
I did not record the error message, but I think it was No space left on device.
I handled it by setting larger sizes for /var/tmp and similar directories.
$ cat /etc/fstab
LABEL=writable / ext4 defaults 0 0
LABEL=system-boot /boot/firmware vfat defaults 0 1
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,size=128m 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,size=128m 0 0
tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults,size=64m 0 0
The site I used as a reference for extending the SD card life set /var/tmp to 16MB, and anyone who copied that as-is will probably run into the same thing.
Test Environment
Raspberry Pi 3 (1GB RAM)
Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS