Yep! With the older CPUs it was released alongside, I believe it was even worse: The data would go through PCIe into the CPU cache, then into DRAM, and then back down PCIe to flash while wasting a few CPU cycles along the way. It looked terrible on benchmarks (literally half the MB/s compared to cheaper flash SSDs that used all 4 lanes) but wasn't too bad in practice since NVME drives can do many requests in parallel.

The real issue was size. I've got 100M CPU cache (5800x3d), 24G VRAM (3090), 64G DRAM, and 2TB flash. I'd need at least 128G of Optane for it to make sense in my cache hierarchy and improve game load times. I could get the $3000 data center Optane SSDs, but that's kinda hard to justify when it's as expensive as my entire PC.