[10000truths]

> at that point just use a RAM disk and periodically write that data to physical disk or SSD. no extreme tradeoff required, because RAM disks are WAY faster than SSDs.

A storage application that need to bypass the filesystem will already be implementing its own caching system anyways. The idea is to persist the data to maintain durability without sacrificing latency.

> manhandling /dev/nvme0 seems equally likely to corrupt data in the event of a power failure.

That is what O_SYNC flag is for.