Sorry, but you are not "99% of the target user base". You may be happy with even a floppy disk drive's speed, but it doesn't take much to see the difference between a NVMe and a SATA SSD in real life. My 80+yo father noticed it immediately and he knows next to nothing about computers. He was only worried that something was broken when the device he used for a short while was all of a sudden so much slower than he expected.It won’t be noticeable at all for 99% of the target user base.
Even a SATA SSD is fast enough that there is no perceivable difference in daily use vs an NVMe.
The only people who will whine are the users on this forum, who already wouldn’t buy this laptop.
It’s a nothingburger.
If you actually use your computer for anything you do notice the disk speeds. CPU speeds not so much. Many are happy with a slow CPU as long as the disks are fast enough, and suddenly offering last decade's speeds at today's prices is just pure greed. Nothing else.