>PCIe switches weren't common or necessary for most consumer applications. Workstation and server CPUs have plenty of lanes on their own. PCIe switches occupied

>PCIe switches weren't common or necessary for most consumer applications. Workstation and server CPUs have plenty of lanes on their own. PCIe switches occupied a relatively narrow use case in the middle where people wanted to use consumer CPUs but attach a lot of add-in cards and share bandwidth across them. PCIe switches still have a place in storage servers. I can build a backplane with a PCIe switch so I can get a ton of ports/slots for HDDs or SSDs and not have to buy a much more expensive CPU with the IO to handle everything. The trade off is that you are over subscribed and all disks will never reach full bandwidth simultaneously.