The 5 cyl engine is one the most reliable engines ever made my vw. It will easily make it to and past 200k miles. The 5 cyl motor is really robust because it's basically a race engine. Audi used to use them back in the days and they pretty much had a shit ton laying around so they decided to take off all the fancy manifolds and stuff that make the engine more powerful and put them into the base model cars to get rid of the surplus of 2.5 5 cyl motors.some even come with a forged crank. The only thing to watch out for really is the vacuum pump. It goes bad time to time but it's fixable with a vacuum pump delete or you can just use some gasket sealer on the gaskets of the new pump which will keep it from leaking again for a really long time. The only problem with this is that with the auto trans it's really really hard to jiggle the pump out Because the auto trans has this little bit of metal in the way. It's doable without doing it the vw recommended way which is dropping the trans but, it's a pain in the ass. Other than that if you do all the maintenance on the car it'll keep on going.
