Every time there is a discussion about Optane on HN I have always said a properly tuned SLC SSD would have provided 80-90% of the performance without the cost associated with it. And the question were always "Show me one".

There isn't one simply because there was't ( yet ) a market for it. Now we have, we also have SLC and may see a come back of Z-NAND ( Samsung specially tuned SLC ).

With the insane money going around AI. Hardware industry is finally enjoying some decent profits and can afford to spend more on R&D. Looking at PCIe 7.0 with 100M IOPS and 100*GB/s next year.