However, given the cases of people losing their assets on Electrum, even though it may have been their own negligence,
Hot wallets are prone to hacking, the people who lost their BTC's on Electrum either had it on a hot wallet and fell for the tricks of scammers or they exposed their seed phrase. If you run Electrum on an air-gapped device it is as secure as a hardware wallet.
I'm wary because I realise that I'm one of those people who can be very careless and still make mistakes when it comes to seed storage.
Even with your hardware wallet you have to store your seed phrase in a secure location, if you are careless or make a mistake with it, you'll still lose your funds just as you'll do with a software or hot wallet.
Safepal isn't one of the recommended hardware wallets you can get, neither is Trezor anyway, because of their implementation of wasabi CoinJoin which is pro-surveillance. Safepal is a closed soure hardware wallet and they don't support things like full node, multi-sig, coin control or other wallets, like Electrum.