I would've seriously considered buying an Optane drive. It's expensive for the capacity, yes, but for under $100 I could've had more than enough capacity for a Linux install and run it on the fastest SSD available. But none of that matters, because I have a computer with a Ryzen processor, and Intel's Optane drives only work with specific Intel processors.
Intel can't sell Optane because they closed the door on a lot of potential customers and because— as if it wasn't enough to only sell to certain customers with very new and high-end Intel processors— they marketed the drives as an HDD cache. So the only people who can buy it are people who would've already spent money on a nice SSD. As several reviewers pointed out when the product launched, it was a great device without a reasonable target market.
I also can't help but think they missed a big opportunity with the memory shortages these last couple years. Many SSDs are being sold without a DRAM cache. What about an XPoint cache? It's much cheaper than DRAM and also has a much longer life. It'd be a perfect cache for a budget SSD to get a lot of the benefits of having a DRAM cache.