Right, because no money went in to making the new hardware...
And extremely expensive, lol, dude, you clearly have no memory of what SSDs used to cost. This is affordable for a next level piece of hardware.
Is it really useful, does it bring a huge user benefit? No, not really, but that's quite often the case with new tech. Did early DDR4 bring a huge benefit over last gen DDR3? No, but now we're way ahead and the same is likely to happen with PCIe 4.0 storage devices. But we need to start somewhere, no? And this is not really expensive for a first gen product.
Also, please don't go comparing this with QLC drives.