For the life of me I don't really get it why Raspberry Pi Foundation does not include onboard eMMC or SSD storage in their non-compute modules products.
Yes with the new PCIe expansion in the latest RPi 5 you can have external SSD for example, but if you decided to use it for other purposes as well like extra Ethernet port expansion then you cannot use it for booting anymore.
> For the life of me I don't really get it why Raspberry Pi Foundation does not include onboard eMMC or SSD storage in their non-compute modules products.
Cost. It's always cost.
If the eMMC or SSD storage is not enough to hold a general purpose OS for all users, then only some users get the value. And if it is big enough, it's put the cost of the machine up above the point at which they feel happiest, when an SD card is perfectly fine for the majority of their target users.
Eben Upton is regularly on record talking about how the cost-per-component/users-per-component tradeoff will lead them to avoid adding a component, and has motivated removing some (composite video for example)
It's curious that there are people who need this, are aware of the compute module, and still complain about it. Is the the availability of the compute module that's a problem?
Yes with the new PCIe expansion in the latest RPi 5 you can have external SSD for example, but if you decided to use it for other purposes as well like extra Ethernet port expansion then you cannot use it for booting anymore.