Didn't SSD's get a start with laptops and mobile devices? There the advantage of being shock resistant is massive and unsolvable with any other solution.
For a superior but new tech to stick, it has to find a viable market to be first self-sustaining, only then can it attack larger and more lucrative markets (Back in those days, PC was probably more lucrative than mobile). Only when SSDs matured enough, did they start eating up the entire storage market.
With SSDs you really feel the performance difference (especially latency) in everyday life. Someone who had experienced an SSD never wanted to go back to a HDD for storing anything but data, since program start-up times are just so much faster when there is no mechanical seeking involved.
The difference between Optane and an SSD was never so striking.
At least for consumer devices, I think the 'primordial soup' spark of motivation was the original lean and mean netbooks (with the initial push to web apps over running full clients locally, before they became low spec windows laptops), with compact flash ATA adapters to displace HDDs. Power consumption was a factor as well IIRC
For a superior but new tech to stick, it has to find a viable market to be first self-sustaining, only then can it attack larger and more lucrative markets (Back in those days, PC was probably more lucrative than mobile). Only when SSDs matured enough, did they start eating up the entire storage market.