The reporting is this case is a little dramatized IMHO. As you can read here [0] they actually use the controller from the 980 Pro and more dense NAND, Billy Tallis from Anandtech filled in some missing technical detail. You actually gain performance in the random 4K case, which is important in day to day operations but you loose sequential write speed if you exceed the SLC-Cache of 115GB.

This differs quite significantly from WD silently changing the Blue drive from TLC (okay with Cache) to QLC which nets you write speeds lower than HDDs after the cache is full. Crucial did TLC->QLC on the P2 too, but you could get those drives for 30% less up until a week ago.

(edit) forgot to mention ADATA who switched the controller of their SX8200 Pro [1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28320640 [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/adata-xpg-sx8200-pro-contr...