There's a good chance SATA 3.5 spec (July 2020) may have provided options to avoid the single-failure issue, with the Defined Ordered NCQ Commands feature. But

There's a good chance SATA 3.5 spec (July 2020) may have provided options to avoid the single-failure issue, with the Defined Ordered NCQ Commands feature. But as you say, there's a ton of things that NVMe just does way better though. From the start, it had much more optimized/slimmer & less chatty protocols (mentioned), multiple queues, and much bigger possible queue depths. NVMe was a huge leap forward. And it continues to evolve really good capabilities. Prioritization, streams features, multi-zoned devices... there's so so so much better capabilities available on NVMe.