I'm not trying to derail the thread or diminish the value what is being discussed, but I think as long as SATA drives exist there won't be much of a reason to go with anything else for retro PCs. Even on modern systems there is hardly any perceptible difference between a decent SATA drive and an NVMe in average consumer workloads, despite the big difference in benchmark numbers.
And it isn't because I use crappy drives... I have always been a stickler for good drive performance, beyond what is really necessary, because the price gap between mid\low end drives and upper-mid\high end drives is far smaller than in other devices (CPU, GPU, motherboard). So I have installed Samsung 840 Pro, 850 EVO, Crucial MX500, SKHynix P31 Gold and Soldigm P44 Pro drives in my main PC over the past 10 years or so, as well as many hard drives for bulk storage. I have all of the storage in my main PC currently on NVMe, simply because the drives got cheap and I thought it'd be "neat" to have a PC with no SATA drives.
... and yet, I fully admit that when I get on my 12 year old Asus Q500A laptop with an Ivy Bridge Core i5 3210M (recently upgraded to an i7 Quad core because reasons) and an Adata SU800 SATA SSD, it runs totally fine for browsing the web (with modern bloated browsers in Windows 10) and isn't that much slower than more modern PCs. There is certainly a difference as the workload gets heavier, but if I was dealing with all of the bottlenecks of a 20 year old PC, I don't think the difference could ever be noticeable between a SATA and an NVMe drive in common retro workloads.
Now for some blitting from the back buffer.