From Article
If huge amounts of small files are what you deal with, it’s probably more convenient to put your files in the cloud or on your own locally hosted NAS device, since speed of access for smaller files is less important.
Speed to transfer a few small files may not be important. If you need to go through hundreds of thousands or millions of them. Say in a database. IOPS becomes very important. Which a cloud service certainly won't compete with and a NAS plus network able to handle such performance would be far more expensive.
Mac users with soldered or very hard to replace SSD or HDD. May want these as a boot drive and file storage. Which would make an interesting future article comparing DIY Thunderbolt 3 vs USB 3.1 Gen 2 vs prebuilt Thunderbolt 3 NVMe models. Anyways IOPS and large file transfer would be important for these users.
Mac users would also likely disproportionately represent external SSD buyers as replacing the internal storage ranges from prohibitively difficult to impossible. Plus their computers have come with USB-C/Thunderbolt ports as a standard for a long time. While anything above USB 3.1 Gen 1 is just starting to catch on in the rest of the PC world and often limited to premium notebooks or desktops.
These drives may also be used for a portable OS and file storage. Drop Ubuntu in it and you can boot to your desktop on a wide variety of computers.