PCIE 3.0 Optane recently sold so well it got backordered and the price popped. (Ok maybe it was LevelOneTechs Wendell? Maybe it was organic? https://www.newegg.com/intel-optane-905p-1-5tb/p/N82E1682016... ) Today PCIE 4.0 prices have fallen so fast that you can RAID0 a few M.2s and get about the same IOPs from a single Optane drive for a similar $ per GB, though not exactly the same durability / DWPD. Chia is no longer a driving force for drive durability, but then again Optane was designed for databases / SAN and not proof-of-space (e.g. PNY https://www.pny.com/lx3030-m2-nvme-ssd ).
Optane as a consumer product might have been a good play when laptops mostly had spinning disks, but market timing was too late. Today those consumer Optane drives were, yeah, a mistake, but a cool part for a homelab.
Optane as an enterprise / workstation product though is king for: * databases / ml datasets that don't fit in memory * large SANs that host critical VM persistent storage
It's a small niche but when IOPS and durability matter, there's nothing close. However if Optane really ends at PCIE 4.0, then top-tier PCIE 5.0 nvme will probably meet or beat Optane in 2024.