This is on an M.2 with a i7-10870H and a 3080M. I installed Windows some days ago on my main Desktop and didn't have to deal with any of that. It must be a new "feature".
When I had to reinstall Windows 11 on a laptop at work with an 11th Gen i7 it took a good 30+ minutes of it faffing about between finishing the setup wizard and reaching the deskfop and when I to installed PopOS on a much older laptop with a 6th Gen i7 it took less than 5 minutes to perform the install
There’s no such thing as an old crappy m.2. That format is way too new to be called old and crappy. Ide hdds are old and crappy, some sata are old and crappy, m.2 is not even old and certainly not crappy
There are definitely crappy M.2 drives. Drives with no cache, slow nand, slow processors, and awful TBW. They’ll be light years faster than a hard drive, but if they fail in a year then are they not crappy?
Sure there are. It's several years old and was low spec already then. You know the timeline of m.2 seemingly so you should be aware what old and crappy means in the context of m.2's age.
And neither are old or crappy. Any m.2 format drive does not deserve to be called either. That just reeks of entitlement to consider any m.2 bad, just sounds like a kid that never used anything actually bad
Any modern SATA SSD will still nearly max out the bus in sequential writes, delivering sequential performance ~3x that of a spinning disk and random performance, even for the cheapest of drives, at >100x a disk.
Installing windows is not generally going to be enough to fill the drive write buffer, and even if it does, they're still going to be comparable to spinning rust. This is a problem that affects low quality (not necessarily cheap) drives, both SATA and NVME.