I can't tell you who to trust, but I'm happy with products from Corsair and Sabrent, zero problems and 5 year warranties. I see no evidence Samsung is the only name you can trust for reliability anymore, which was a huge part of why I trusted them. I certainly think the San Disk Firecuda range are also excellent. Do your homework and and look at the brands that have been offering products for several years. I Agree I won't just buy something on spec from some company I've never heard of though.
My concern is data loss, either as a result of controller bugs or unreliable flash memory. I don't think either are often covered by warranties. While I've been successful at RMAing
one SSD with lots of SMART-errors, quite often I've observed endurance rating is exceeded (if it's visible), or there are just a lot of SMART errors, even though I'm pretty sure the user haven't written hundreds of GB every day. I've seen this a lot with developer workstations at one of my previous employers, there were stacks of bad SSDs piling up, many of which went bad long before 2 years of use, and that's just by writing code, which is text. I've also seen the same with my own hardware and various home computers that I've troubleshooted. I'm pretty sure tiny writes causes the endurance of SSDs to be used up much quicker than most people think. And the endurance ratings of SSDs these days are ridiculous.
We were talking about reliability of firmware/controllers, not the NAND package itself. These days though, realistically, almost all controllers are reliable, as long as you get them from a reasonably well know company.
It is worth mentioning that even Samsung have screwed up with firmware. Some years ago they had some bad firmware which caused major data loss for Linux users.
TRIM-support has also been a cause of concern with many SSDs (not Samsung though), and buggy implementation here can cause a lot of data loss and wear.
I don't trust any company that outsorces development of their storage products, it's a little different than outsourcing a keyboard, a PSU or monitor, there is much less need for support and updates there.
You can't get the 970 Pro retail anymore, but yes, nothing will be better than MLC drives for read/write durability.
They are still obtainable in my area, and I am considering buying one extra for an upcoming build, but it's probably a matter of weeks before they're gone. I will probably use a PCIe4/5 drive for the OS though, and I always build with a separate OS drive both due to high wear and risk of corruption due to hardware or software.
But considering how large SLC caches some SSDs have, why wouldn't they release a pure SLC "pro" SSD? This would be even better than MLC, and I think this is an excellent untapped market, instead of focusing on the race to the bottom with these "bargain bin" QLC SSDs.