There were very few consumer PCIe SSDs sold before the adoption of NVMe, and they were almost exclusively sold to OEMs rather than as retail products. A few like the Samsung XP941 and SM951 were available through grey-market retailers for about a year before Samsung launched the 950 PRO as an official retail product, using NVMe (with an Option ROM). (Note: the SM951 existed in both AHCI and NVMe variants, so some of those grey-market retail sales were of drives that were essentially 950 PROs with slightly older flash).
It's not entirely impossible that Gigabyte shipped boards that couldn't boot from AHCI PCIe SSDs. But it would be difficult for that to be a driver issue. I'd expect those boards to also have difficulty booting from an add-in SATA controller card, because the difficulty booting from AHCI SSDs would have to come not from a lack of an AHCI driver but from a misconfiguration preventing that driver from being used with anything other than the SATA controller built-in to the motherboard.
How sure are you that you didn't miss the brief era of AHCI SSDs entirely and are simply remembering early NVMe teething issues?
It had to be AHCI because macOS didn't support NVMe in this era, and the motherboard was also chosen for Hackintosh compatibility, but I only ever used it as a data drive because of the boot issues. That was probably the best option for its use as a fast compile machine anyway, but it did become a PITA when I wanted to sell the machine.
I'm afraid I am not familiar with this technology - as I said I am not an expert - so perhaps driver is the wrong word. Perhaps I did end up reading advice relating to the NVMe variant, information was very hard to come by. All a very small historical footnote now anyway!
I think we still would have been stuck with a bunch of vendors making exotic expensive boutique flash storage systems for a while had Intel not come by & made a fairly sizable overhaul of the existing protocols.