I don't think there were SSDs that large when they first came out in the late 2000's. I saved up for an 80GB one back around 2009, and it was an absolute piece of trash. It was fast when it wanted to be, but most of the time it would randomly stutter and just go unresponsive for several seconds causing the rest of the PC to hang up until it decided to start responding again. After fighting with it for too long, I replaced it with a traditional harddrive which at least behaved as it was supposed to.
It was several years later before I tried another SSD, buying a relatively inexpensive 120GB drive that actually did live up to the hype.
Just because a hammer makes for a lousy screwdriver doesn't mean it's not a good hammer. To me, AI just another tool. Like any other tool, there's things it is good at and there are things it is bad at. I've also found it can be pretty good as a code completion engine. Not perfect, but there's plenty of boilerplate stuff and repetitive things where it can figure out the pattern and I can bang out the lines of code pretty quickly with the AI's help. On the other hand, there's times it's nearly useless and I switch back to the keyword completion engine as it's the better tool for those situations.