"most of it ended up in devices with low endurance like thumb drives and SD cards"
Can you please elaborate? I was under the impression that thumb drives and SD cards mostly used MLC or eMLC NAND?
I don't like these 19 and 16 nm chips. You need over-provision and complex ECC algorithms just to correct all the errors the drive outputs after a year or so. The industry is going in the wrong direction, IMO. Samsung has 40 nm 3D NAND, but it would be even better to have that at 65 nm. I don't mind paying 2-3x the price if the endurance is an order of magnitude better.
Even with RAM, do we really need more capacity over having ECC? Solar flares happen all the time. Data keeps growing and becoming more valuable, this is a real issue. Most people don't even checksum their data!
I guess if you're playing video games it doesn't matter. But content creators should care.