Nobody has had a faster or more reliable consumer M.2 or SATA SSD than Samsung, for probably five years running, at least. Nobody.
I have to disagree, MX500 and WD Blue dont lose to 860EVO and share the first place.
as far as NVMe, Phison E12 is the leader in endurance + Price + warranty:
Corsair MP510 2Tb: 259$ [Endurance: 3120TBW] + 5 Year warranty.
Corsair MP510 1Tb: 139$ [Endurance: 1700TBW] + 5 Year warranty.
Before EVO Plus Came out EVO was losing to Phison E12 and SM2262/SM2262EN
Now with EVO Plus they go head to head and win lose 50/50, your own website's 1TB review compares it vs Phison E12 [PBX Pro] and SM2262EN SX8200 Pro, you can see it for yourself.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-970-evo-plus-ssd,5608-3.html
Same review in 500GB category vs PBX Pro and SX8200 [non pro older SM2262 controller] has same situation.
We also have to consider price, if we wont consider price then Optane wins hands down and there is no discussion, but if we consider price, when 500GB EVO PLUS = 1TB Phison E12 1TB [109USD] and all Phison drives have 5 years warranty and insane endurance, Samsung is not a winner anymore.
It doesn't offer any value to cost twice as much.
But we know that choosing an SSD is not just benchmarks, each SSD may lose in some benchmarks but win in others, one that great for databse is not great for system, one with high sequantal writes but low mixed work doesn't suited to be snappy system drive, or in reverse too.
Choosing DATA drive is easy, but choosing the BEST System drive is hard, sequential are irrelevant here, Optane proved it, 4K random read write is highly important and mixed workload performance.
I wish web sites like Tomshardware, anadtech and all the rest that benchmark tens if not hundreds of SSD, also categorize them based on results: This suited as best System drive, this suited as best archive drive, this suited as best database drive drive, this suited as best virtualization drive [that will be Optane of course], this suited as best multi user video streaming etc