going to have a construction project going on over a month or so and wanted to capture the process.

any suggestions for a camera? Gopro? something else?

Do you want to capture the whole process (every 30 sec, 5 min, hour), or updates day by day?

When we had our pool built I mounted a gopro on an exterior pillar, plugged into an external battery pack, and had it take a picture every 30 seconds for the whole day.

Then each night I would have to clear off the memory card and re-mount it before the workers showed up the next day. That worked well, but it was for a small area

I was thinking every 30 mins to an hour, I was worried about the batteries dying, is there a way to have it plugged in?

And I have never had a GoPro, was looking at the Hero 7 black, but saw on Costco the 8 Black with some things for only $40 more. Or even getting an older model

I used a hero 5 for my project. I had the gopro plugged into a brick charger and it lasted the whole day.
The other part for this will be how accessible ( to change out memory cards, recharge, batter/battery pack, etc.)

Thanks, i have an upstairs balcony so access is easy.

Game camera in interval mode. Probably could do whole project without messing with it if you choose the right parameters.
Before gopro an trail cameras I built a little trigger circuit that caused a small digital camera to take a shot every few hours during daylight. Had a substantial external battery and mounted in in enclosure in a tree. After a little over a year of construction took it down and stitched together a time lapse of the teardown and rebuild.
Gopro are cool but you don't likely need their resolution it will just eat memory.