There's something called the silicon lottery, for 90% or even more the SSD will outlast your device, but what about those 10% of the cases? your whole laptop will be just e-waste and thats not even taking into consideration the money that peeps sink into a mac. Even with apple care what if this shit happens after 3 years? what are you gonna do? and if you think I'm just fear-mongering or the chances of this happening is pretty low then just look at the video. I think Louis should be enough of an authority to convince you otherwise.
And let's forget all this crap, even at a basic level, the only reason the SSD is soldered is because Apple decided to say, "**** you, you gonna pay up b**ch, and no we aint gonna let you upgrade later. Its all or nothing". I get it, the macs are some of the most efficient laptops on the market, they have a premium package in a light weight chassis that can outlast your other devices and I get why the want a premium for it. But is this really justifiable for all the bullshit Apple makes you go through? even for basic stuff that's available even in a 30k laptop?
Thats like a company screwing you over and you bending over backwards to make it more convenient for them. I really love Rossman's take on this, Companies dont take away things from us, We let them take it away from us.
And even if all of this is bullshit for you, just think about the ecological impact stuff like this has, when a user has to either discard his laptop just because he lost the silicon lottery.
I dont know about you but whenever I buy a laptop, I account for it lasting me atleast 5-6 years at a minimum. We have a HP Probook from 2010 still chugging around which we gave to our servant. A 2014 Dell which is working as the primary laptop for our office, my sister's 2012 Dell which serves as a backup office laptop, my 2017 Dell 7577 which is my ghetto NAS/HTPC, and my slim 7i and 5i but I digress, the point is shit like this should never be paywalled just because a company decided to **** its customers over and I didnt even get into the pricing of Macs.
P.S. I do agree with your point. it's just a general thing and not a long term commitment but it's precisely OEMs like apple which are forcing you to do so. e.g. I got my Legion 5i with 16 gigs of ram and 512gb ssd to save on costs (kinda regret it now since Lenovo was giving 980 pros for ssds and the 1tb upgrade was cheaper than buying a 1tb 980 pro) but after a while storage and ram both were inadequate for my usecase, so I just traded in my ram sticks for a 32 gig kit and plopped a 2tb ssd in my second ssd slot. I didn't even need to spend a minute on this decision and now imagine doing something like this on a mac.