I am a Computer Hardware professional. I started working with computer technology in the early eighties. I have seen the evolution of technology starting with closed platforms like the game console era and then the move toward open platforms like the Home Computer Golden Age. In the last 5 or 10 years, I have witnessed technology changes that are slowly moving away from open hardware designs towards hardware that is locked down and can’t be modified by the user.
The consumer grade 2.5" drives may be half empty, but the enterprise grade ones are mostly heatsink so they don’t thermal throttle within a minute of heavy use. M.2 drives are way too small. It was fine for SATA speeds, but not for the PCIe 5 NVMe drives.