alt Hacker News> This is a wild and very wrong take.
That's what happens when you quote only part of a statement. Taken in context, it was referring to a very real decline in expansion cards. Now that NICs (for WiFi) and SSDs have been moved into their own compact specialized slots, and Ethernet and audio have been standard integrated onto the motherboard itself for decades, the regular PCIe slots are vestigial. They simply are not widely used anymore for expanding a PC with a variety of peripherals (that era was already mostly over by the transition from 32-bit PCIe to PCIe).
Across all desktop PCs, the most common number of slots filled is one (a single GPU), and the average is surely less than one (systems using zero slots and relying on integrated graphics must greatly outnumber systems using more than one slot).
Even GPUs themselves are a horrible argument in favor of PCIe slots. The form factor is wildly unsuitable for a high-power compute accelerator, because it's ultimately derived from a 1980s form factor that prioritized total PCB area above all else, and made zero provisions for cards needing a heatsink and fan(s).
> Ethernet and audio have been standard integrated onto the motherboard itself for decades
Unless the one it comes with isn't as fast as the one you want, or they didn't integrate one at all, or you need more than one.
> Across all desktop PCs, the most common number of slots filled is one (a single GPU), and the average is surely less than one (systems using zero slots and relying on integrated graphics must greatly outnumber systems using more than one slot).
There is an advantage in having an empty slot because then you can put something in it.
Your SSD gets full, do you want to buy one which is twice as big and then pay twice as much and screw around transferring everything, or do you want to just add a second one? But then you need an empty slot.
You bought a machine with an iGPU and the CPU is fine but the iGPU isn't cutting it anymore. Easy to add a discrete GPU if you have somewhere to put it.
The time has come to replace your machine. Now you have to transfer your 10TB of junk once. You don't need 100Gbps ethernet 99% of the time, but using the builtin gigabit ethernet for this is more than 24 hours of waiting. A pair of 100Gbps cards cuts that >24 hours down to ~15 minutes. If the old and new machines have an empty slot.