I think modularity made more sense in an area where significant performance gains happened in hardware every 6 months. It makes very little sense with a 6+ year

I think modularity made more sense in an area where significant performance gains happened in hardware every 6 months. It makes very little sense with a 6+ year horizon -- at that point you're upgrading everything anyway. Now, modularity is really a right-to-repair issue, not anything that provides a meaningful benefit to upgrading. And for that things just need to be "modular" enough to repair by a specialist.