I'm a little surprised that they didn't standardize the SSD capacity, or perform tests on empty vs nearly-full SSDs. Increasing size slightly decreases read speeds, just like L3 caches.
On the full drive part, a several hundred GB SSD will almost always nearly "empty" in practice for this application. That is why you see 8GB and 16GB RAM based solutions (e.g. the venerable ZeusRAM.)
From what I understand Optane is fast enough to not need this extra controller processing. Resulting in the incrediblly latency performance demonstrated by Optabe drives. I suspect if Intel wanted to sacrifice latency, they could dramatically increase top line read and write performance by performing the same read and write interleaving that NAND SSDs do.
At any capacity or channel configuration, 3D XPoint devices benefit from not having to perform large block erase operations. They can perform reads and writes at the same granularity, allowing for in-place modification of data instead of requiring a log structure with garbage collection under the hood.
NVDIMM-N would probably also be great for slog. https://www.anandtech.com/show/12029/micron-announces-32gb-d...
I expect it will soon become common for high-end enterprise NVMe SSDs to include a few GB of DRAM accessible through the new Persistent Memory Region feature, so that they can be accessed through simple PCIe memory read and write operations, but will automatically be preserved by the SSD in the event of a power failure. It won't be as fast as a NVDIMM, but works with existing form factors and platforms.
You seem to be much more concerned with venting anger than conveying accurate or relevant information.
I'm not a fan of the end of life behavior of Intel SSDs either, but it's a consistent policy that does work well for enterprise usage scenarios, with no unexpected data loss. They probably shouldn't be applying the same policy to the consumer products. But the fact that there are valid criticisms to be made doesn't mean this particular one was fair or germane.