The low performance because of SSD geometry is bad design, that's true (that shouldn't have happened).

On the other hand, I still think that having slots adds a lot of bulk to system design. Considering SSDs have limited life spans, being able to change them makes great sense, but when you dedicate 90% of your footprint to battery, it becomes hard to make them replaceable.

One might argue that HP, Dell and Lenovo offers this, and I suggest buying these machines if that's importance to you. I'm fond of all three companies' higher end designs, but Apple provides more at the same price point, at least for me.

I’m sorry but anyone with an entry level pro is not going to be using the ssd enough to notice any perf difference.

This is really nitpicking.

It’s only huge in one synthetic benchmark which doesn’t represent what users do: sustained linear writes to storage on the lowest-end model where it went from two chips to one. How often do you need to completely fill the disk in 2 minutes rather than 3? If you did have a situation where you can meaningfully write data that quickly, you’d presumably also have enough data that you’d buy the larger models or you’d be using external storage.

Random I/O is the number most people are affected by and there’s a reason the clickbait commenters never mention that: you don’t see this large an effect and these machines are all more than fast enough for the vast majority of buyers. That will not get you a ton of YouTube impressions so it’s all about a use-case these machines don’t have.