The point is that a simple Optane memory drive is half that cost and is even faster than your 960 EVO in many uses. Lower price and faster speed is something that most of us should want.
Just because your use case doesn't require anything faster at the moment does not mean that the rest of us don't need faster drives. I have many files (mostly Excel and PDFs) that I use that bring my SSD down to a standstill and would love a faster way to open them. Heck, just booting GIMP is an exercise in frustration waiting for my SSD to open all the files. Note: I don't have Optane yet as I haven't yet purchased my next computer that would be compatible.
Optane certainly isn't for everyone (yet). But the quote above that "nobody cares about Optane" seems to be lacking imagination of where Optane is going. An on-CPU Optane memory chip would be a game changer for many use cases and would add very little to the cost of the CPU.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-emib-interconnect-fpga-chiplet,35316.html
Or memory-intensive uses suddenly become financially viable. Think about self-driving cars that need ~1 GB of memory per second of driving. At current DDR4 prices, that is nearly $10/second. The simple 32 GB Optane memory would take that down to $1.84/second while the Optane 900p would be $1.25/second. Do you really want the car to be using your far slower and 1/85th the endurance 960 EVO for its life and death decisions? I could go on and on with other use business use cases (servers, big data, simulations, etc) that need massive amounts of memory and would love to be 10x cheaper.