The IO done by applications like web browsers and Spotify may be synchronous from their perspective (i.e. write(2) syscalls instead of aio), but those applications definitely don't need the sort of hard ACID transactional guarantees that require all disk caches to be disabled and every single write command sent to the drive to be a barrier. The fact that they're running atop journaling filesystems is good enough.

I've had about 20 spinning drives fail on me in the past 25 years or so. The more I can keep spinning drives out of my life, the happier I am, generally.

You're right about the volume of data written; it's nearly as much as read, likely due to continuously syncing browsers - I leave my desktop on 24/7, and run 2 browsers, all of which probably doesn't help. It doesn't add up to an argument for high IOPS though.

I chose the Samsung drive primarily because of all the stories about premature SSD failures - all the drives I've bought have either been Intel or Samsung. I got this model because it was the 1TB option that was both SSD and either Samsung or Intel.

I cannot tell you how many days I've wasted replacing disks in home raid arrays, or before that recovering data from backups. I'm also done with trying to shuffle data between tiny SSDs and large spinning disks based on required speed of access. I keep all my bulky files on my ZFS NAS, but I don't worry about how many apps or games I have installed - 1T has, for now, been more than enough.