Might their professionals market segment (designers, video editors, 3d artists, and so on) still be using thunderbolt and LAN storage? This was the case ~7 years ago when I worked adjacent to these sorts of users. Video files are huge and expensive in time and money to transit with cloud storage providers.
Apple used to even sell Xserve RAID and SAN software specifically to cater to the higher end users who needed fast networked storage (research, broadcast, media).
They kinda hit a standstill on the networking side as they moved to the trash can Mac, and I think that had killed momentum towards any high speed IO besides the Thunderbolt ports moving forward.
I was hopeful they'd keep the Mac Pro going into the M-series era but after one version... it's gone.
I do 8k video editing on a Mac Studio. Files are often multiple TB (raw camera capture which I have to encode to ProRes). Moving this kind of bandwidth is absolutely what I have to do and Apples’ bad networking is a blocker I’ve discovered.