It's mostly not competitive by virtue of being old, but for specific use cases it still stomps the latest Gen5 nvme drives. Specifically on things that need low latency and fast QD1 performance.

Think metadata in a ZFS array or database writes.

Also crazy endurance - often an order of magnitude beyond even enterprise nvmes.

...and because the things are basically un-killable thanks to endurance you can safely pick up 2nd hand used ones.

So they're a neat trick if used in precisely the right application. Hence:

>some fraction of technologists

>would've been awesome if only Intel hadn't killed it.

Maybe - it would presumably have improved further for niche cases, but doubt it would have conquered mainstream markets.