Earlier quoted context omitted.
IOPS is measuring throughput for parallel operations. Optane SSDs have extremely low latency , which is critical for sequential operations. Most operating systems have long phases of largely single-threaded synchronous I/O, or nearly so. They certainly can't maintain queue depth required to even approach 500K IOPS.
At queue depth 1 the 980 pro delivers 20k reads per second / 45k writes per second. That still sounds like a huge amount. Optane is faster, but is it enough to matter outside some extremely demanding niches?
IOPS do not tell the whole story here. Consider disk A, at 1M IOPS, against disk B, at 1k IOPS. Suppose the workload is light, at only 500 IOPS, which are "small" enough to service quickly. Which disk is higher performing?
You might say they're both capable of the task, so just get the cheaper one. This is wrong. Assume, for sake of a simple argument, that disk A can respond in 1us to these requests, and disk B in 1ms. That is, they'd be able to hit "max IOPS" on these requests, if only you have enough. Then disk A services the whole thing in 500us per second, or 0.05% used, and disk B in 500ms per second, or 50% used.
So disk A is in fact actually 1000x faster, if you're waiting on its result. Which, for single-threaded operations, you often are. If you're instead optimizing for throughput, you don't care.
Either point of view can be correct, at different times or for different systems. Ignorance that both points of view exist is how things like bufferbloat are everywhere now.