Comment by nayuki

> the embedded system model where you get flash hardware that has two operations -- erase block and write block

> just attach commodity dumb flash chips to our computer

I kind of agree with your stance; it would be nice for kernel- or user-level software to get low-level access to hardware devices to manage them as they see fit, for the reasons you stated.

Sadly, the trend has been going toward smart devices for a very long time now. In the very old days, stuff like floppy disk seeks and sector management were done by the CPU, and "low-level formatting" actually meant something. Decades ago, IDE HDDs became common, LBA addressing became the norm, and the main CPU cannot know about disk geometry anymore.