The real demand for a core like this in SSD controllers comes from doing more computationally expensive work on the SSD controller than just providing a block storage device abstraction. Stuff like embedding a full key-value database on the SSD or providing more general-purpose compute capability is a hot topic for enterprise storage. There's already at least one company shipping an SSD controller for computational storage with a mix of realtime cores and Cortex-A53 cores. The Cortex-R82 means such a chip could be more homogeneous with just one type of ARM core.
> With approximately 85% market share of storage processors, this is an important market for Arm.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tiriasresearch/2020/09/03/arm-c...
Not sure what that means in practice though, this is out of my scope.
Edit: Well looking into it a bit, a lot of SSDs already use realtime ARM processors in their controllers. The main benefit here seems to be being able to address larger buffer sizes going forward and access to more cores.