Wouldn't people just be moving away from SATA SSDs because those M.2 NVMe SSDs or whatever they're called, the ones shaped like a rectangular wafer, seem superior in practically every way? Aren't there are also PCIe SSDs, at the very least, from Intel? (Edit: After a quick search, they appear to have been yet another long gone trend, another Intel thing that failed. The Intel 750 series were SSDs that plugged into graphics card slots.)

I don't like SATA at all. Never bought any SATA drives for anything I assembled.

I didn't know about Micron/Crucial exiting the RAM business. I remember thinking that they were some of the best priced in 2017 when there seemed to be a severe RAM price increase. GPUs were also very expensive at that time. I don't know when that 2017 crisis ended. I can only recall something about South Korean factories. Don't even know if it was RAM or GPUs that were coming out of those factories. I haven't been paying any real attention to computer hardware (or video games) since then: my memories are vague.

Back then, you had a few trends like Intel Optane. They were something like a cache between RAM and hard drives that sped up hard drives at times. That was a total flop. But people into custom PC building were going on about it at the time.