It's gotta be a bug. Hopefully this will get on Apple's radar.

Edit: for what it's worth, here's my stats from my 8GB M1 MacBook Air after ~2 months of continuous heavy usage as my main work machine:

  Percentage Used:                    0%
  Data Units Read:                    4,622,487 [2.36 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 2,301,067 [1.17 TB]

Hmm... My M1 Air 16GB from December is an order of magnitude higher than that, but I do usually have 10 VS Code windows open, lots of Node instances, databases, Slack, and LOTS of browser tabs. Should I be worried?

  Percentage Used:                    1%
  Data Units Read:                    74,899,871 [38.3 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 71,233,417 [36.4 TB]

If you can, run iosnoop in background and note every program that writes 4kb chunks a lot.

These are wearing your SSD down.

And no, they will not be combined together because most of these shitty apps have O_DIRECT flag set or call fsync() after each write(), making the OS obligated to hit SSD with 4kb write.

SSD's don't operate that way, though, a 4kb write is guaranteed to become a bigger write since SSD cell/block is usually either 512kb, or 1mb, or 2mb, or hell even 4mb. So one 4kb per second becomes 4mb per second, and that's 345.6GB/day.

Pretty scary how one shitty app can ruin your ssd so fast, huh? I saw google drive app do 50 small writes per second. That's ~2TB/day.