Are LSM-trees actually holding back modern NVMe hardware?

Hi makers! I’ve been obsessed with storage performance lately. We keep buying 7GB/s NVMe drives, but most databases still use architecture (like LSM-trees) designed for a time when disks were the bottleneck.

Background compactions, write-amplification spikes, and P99 latency jitters seem to be the "tax" we pay for general-purpose storage. Is it time we move toward memory-first, zero-compaction engines, even if it means trading off some RAM? Or is the LSM-tree still the king of the hill? Would love to hear from anyone fighting database latency at scale!