Nobody should be surprised by that, but I found the behavior of the failing drive odd. Somehow one m.2 drive failing made the other one act strangely at least as far as Steam failing to update games on C: when D: was failing.
Replaced D: and instantly the system booted faster and steam worked fine again. The whole thing makes me think there could be something bad with the storage traffic control tower hardware is on this AMD (AM4) CPU or motherboard, wherever it is these days. Maybe it’s on the m.2 directly in which case I guess it could be Windows failing here but AMD seems like an easy target for ye olde razor.
Thanks to GameStop selling me a battlefield branded m.2 months ago for a suspiciously low price I already had a replacement that I was planning to use whenever I built a machine next. Unfortunately both the new and old D: drives are WD so I am very suspicious of the new one already even though that is extremely silly when the one that died was about 5 years old and the other is maybe two years old and fresh.