We don't care about (TBW/TB) at the consumer level, we care about (TBW/$), and 3D TLC was far, far cheaper per TB, so much so that TBW/$ was not a numerical advantage of Optane.

That left ONLY the near-RAM-read-latency, which is only highly beneficial on specific workloads. Then they didn't invest in expanding killer app software that could utilize that latency, and didn't drop prices sufficiently to make it highly competitive with big RAMdisks.