[xoa]

Sure in a few cases, it's well known and a straight forward cost/performance tradeoff. Manufacturer internal specified over-provisioning is mainly a matter of economics. Within the technical limits of their particular NAND and controller, they pick a number that will yield the desired performance and longevity for their general target audience of the drive within the right price budget, but there's nothing wrong with tweaking that a bit if someone has different needs. More space can improve performance in some areas, in particular performance consistency and IOPSs, and increase overall drive longevity, but that extra NAND is of course not available for user use. One of the general differences in "enterprise" drives (beyond features like power loss caps) is just plain much higher factory over-provisioning.

It's not bad to know about, it's just another tradeoff case in storage. For scenarios that can benefit from IOPS/consistency or have huge, random loads it may be a very simple way to get a nice bump, particularly out of a "consumer" drive. For simpler loads it's a total waste versus more available storage, or even a negative if it would result in data getting pushed off of SSD onto something slower. The value also can vary from drive to drive too, so it should always get tested.

I agree with you though that the article should have mentioned that, like all tuning, there are no universals (or the manufacturer would have done it already), and that in general for modern SSDs the defaults are just fine unless you've got a specific reason otherwise (and can quantify the result). I suppose many programmers will be generating loads far higher then the typical consumer, but even so I suspect default will usually be the right choice.