Would you rather go back to the modem days and call a 'Transfer' a 'Baud'?

PAM encoding is already analog, and also correspondingly more expensive (power, silicon size, etc) for the increase in speed.

It really wouldn't surprise me if even on workstation platforms only a subset of core lanes were Gen6+ and the common slots were redriven Gen5 or less off of a router / switch chip.

> Would you rather go back to the modem days and call a 'Transfer' a 'Baud'?

We don't have to go back, baud is still in use. I would expect transfers per second to be a synonym for baud though, and for bits per second per pin to use a different word.