[mmf]

I think the main reason they did not expose lower level semantics is that the wanted a drop in replacement for hdds. The second is liability: unfettered access ti arbitrary location erases (and writes) can let you kill (wear out) a flash device in a really short time.

[MobiusHorizons]

I could see that argument for sata SSDs, but the subject of the thread is NVME drives.

[wtallis]

SATA vs NVMe vs SCSI/SAS only matters at the lowest levels of the operating system's storage stack. All the filesystem code and almost all of the block layer can work with any of those transports using the same HDD-like abstractions. Switching to a more flash-friendly abstraction breaks compatibility throughout the storage stack and potentially also with assumptions made by userspace.