That may have been the ideal usage back in the day, but ideal usage now is just for setting up swap. Write-heavy workloads are king with Optane, and threshing to swap is the prototypical example of something that's so write-heavy it's a terrible fit for NAND. Optane might not have been "as fast as DRAM" but it was plenty close enough to be fit for purpose.
That would be fine if I could put it in an M.2 slot. But all my computers already have RAM in their RAM slots, and even if I had a spare RAM slot, I don't know that I'd trust the software stack to treat one RAM slot as a drive...
And their whole deal was making RAM persistent anyway, which isn't exactly what I want.
Optane M.2-format hardware exists.
Interesting, all I ever saw advertised was that weird persistent kinda slow RAM stick. Does the M.2 version just show up as a normal block device or is that too trying to be persistent RAM?
Iirc it wasn't great because higher power == more heat though
That could be addressed with a small NVMe heatsink. They're available and their use is advised already for NAND PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 hardware, but they would fit the Optane use just as well.