Why don't SSDs have built-in protections against excessive writes?
Excessive writes (e.g., due to a software bug) can kill an SSD.
I've had this one SSD since at least 2013 and it ain't dead yet. It's been duct taped in laptops and formatted and overwritten multiple times with different operating systems. it's been used as an external USB drive with a little connector. For a laugh I've actually forced a defragment on it using mydefrag a couple times. If any SSD should have died due to excessive writes it should have been this one.
Alternative thread: How to disable built in write protections on my SSD? I'm a programmer and I know what I'm doing...
There's S.M.A.R.T. and a lot of freeware that can read it and tell you how much has been written to the disk. If only it were built into operating systems, with a graph, then you could set up warnings, like you can for overheating CPUs, etc.
Who's to say a workload is excessive?