Which tells me your experience is incredibly limited.

Intel was very good, and when they partnered with Micron, made objectively the best SSD's ever made (3DXPoint Optanes). I lament that they sold their storage business unit, though of all the potential buyers, SK was probably the best case scenario (they since rebranded that into Solidigm).

The intel X25-E was a great drive, but it is not great by modern standards and in any write-focused workload it is an objectively, provably bad drive by any standard these days. Let's compare it to a Samsung 9100 Pro 8TB which is a premium consumer drive, and a quasi mid level enterprise drive (depends on usecase, it's lacking a lot of important enterprise features such as PLP) that's still a far cry from the cream of the crop, but has an MSRP comparable to the X25-E's at launch

X25-E 64GB vs 9100 Pro 8TB:

MSRP: ~$900 ($14/GB) vs ~$900 ($0.11/GB)

Random Read (IOPS): 35.0k vs 2,200k

Random Write (IOPS): 3.3k vs 2,600k

Sustained/Seq Read (MBps): 250 vs 14,800

Sustained/Seq Write (MBps): 170 vs 13,400

Endurance: >=2PB writes vs >= 4.8 PB writes

In other words, it loses very badly in every metric, including performance and endurance per dollar (in fact, it loses so bad on performance that it still isn't close even if we assume the X25-E is only $50), and we're not even into the high end of what's possible with SSD's/NAND flash today. Hell, the X25-E can't even compare to a Crucial MX500 SATA SSD except on endurance which it only barely beats (2PB for X25-E vs 1.4PB for 4TB). The X25-E's incredibly limited capacity (64GB max) also makes it a non-starter for many people no matter how good the performance might be (but isn't).

Yes, per cell the X25-E is far more durable than a MX500 or 9100 Pro yielding a Disk Write Per Day endurance of about 17DWPD, which is very good. An Intel P4800X however (almost a 10 year old drive itself) had 60DWPD, or more than 3x the endurance when normalized for Capacity, while also blowing it - and nearly every other SSD ever made until very very recently - out of the water on the performance front as well. And let's not forget, not only can you supplement per-cell endurance with having more cells (aka more capacity), but the X25-E's maximum capacity of 64GB makes it a non-starter for the vast majority of use-cases right out of the gate, even if you try to stack them in an array.

For truly high end drives, look at what the Intel P5800X, Micron 9650 MAX, or Solidigm D7-5810 are capable of for example.

Oh, and btw, a lot of those high end drives have SLC as their Transition Flash Layer, sometimes in capacities greater than the X25-E was available in. So the assertion that they don't make SLC isn't true either, we just got better about designing these devices so that we aren't paying over $10/GB anymore.

So no. By todays standards the X25-E is not "the diamond peak". It's the bottom of the barrel and in most cases, non-viable.

The RAM shortage comes for us all