They cannot truly boot externally- even when you do boot external there is an initial dependency on the SSD, so if it fails you have an expensive brick.
They've been soldering them on since the 2016 MBP[0]. I thought you were referring to the reports of unusually high writes on M1 macs, thus shortening the life of SSDs[1].
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26244093