I'm pretty sure Intel loaned him the P5800X drives, starting before they were widely available for purchase. But those are a different product from the Optane DC persistent memory product that uses DIMM slots instead of PCIe and NVMe.
I mention io_uring in my original comment. The issue isn’t that the tech doesn’t exist, it’s that it’s not being used.
And even before that there was Linux AIO etc.
A nice counter-example are project loom green threads which will make use of it. But yeah it is very much underused