Comment by userbinator

That first article was 12 years ago when MLC was the norm and had 10k endurance.

Macronix have known about the benefits of heating for a long time but previously used to bake NAND chips in an oven at around 250C for a few hours to anneal them – that’s an expensive and inconvenient thing to do for electronic components!

I wonder if the e-waste recycling operations in China may be doing that to "refurbish" worn out NAND flash and resell it. They already do harvesting of ICs so it doesn't seem impossible... and maybe this effect was first noticed by someone heating the chips to desolder them.