They're used, but rare because they got to a weird position in between slower drives that are cheaper to produce and operate and SSDs. E.g. 15K RPM drives were a thing but while you can still buy some models they're typically more expensive than SSDs, so you mostly buy them to replace drives in existing arrays.
I have no opinion on the matter, just pointing out that your comment doesn't follow from the previous one. But I imagine that when they said "nobody" uses faster disks, they were exaggerating a bit. The question is whether the default set of "latency numbers everyone should know" should reference SSDs or uncommon spinning disks.