Octane was an incremental improvement in performance when compared to SSD, and in cost when compared to RAM. An awkward spot to be in.
Optane PM was byte-addressable and had latency of ~300 ns. It rendered the entire block storage abstraction obsolete. It was so radical that using it effectively would require throwing out the assumptions all OSes have made about IO for the past fifty years.
The fact that it offered an incremental improvement even when its unique capabilities were completely ignored shows how phenomenally capable the technology was.