It makes sense business wise. Getting new features is sexy/sell-able. Refactoring existing/working code to be smaller/faster/secure/etc isn't.
‘As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.’
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/09/18/strategy-letter-vi...
https://www.cnet.com/products/dell-latitude-e6500/specs/
It came out in October 2008
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Latitude-E6500-Not...
SSDs are roughly 100x faster than HDDs, so they're superior despite offering less TB. Unless you're a gamer constantly downloading new 50GB games, most people are fine with ~300GB of storage.
People want faster storage, as opposed to more storage.
I want 2TB of space and the speed of an SSD, and I don't want to pay much.
Hybrid hard drives seemed like the perfect solution (a few GB of flash, combined with a 2TB drive).
Sadly, nobody managed to get decent performance on hybrid drives. As far as I'm aware, none really had a good grasp of the filesystem, so none could make decisions like 'these small dll files will likley need low latency reads, stick them in the flash, while these massive mp4 files will probably be streamed, leave them on the hd'.