I agree!
Its quite sad because like you said, when you look at the price of an SSD, (doesn't have to be an NVME, even though those came down in pricing) their very affordable, same with ram. Furthermore, these companies get discounts on pricing as they buy them in bulk. When SSD's first came out, yes I can see them not being in every laptop, but now, there's absolutely no excuse. I mean you can buy for a 2.5 512GB SSD for next to nothing now a days. Even the m.2 sata SSDs (not NVME) are just as cheap.
Personally I think it's all marketing. What I mean is, 1TB looks better than 512GB. 1TB SSD's are still a little more expensive, but those are coming down in price too, maybe I'm wrong though. Also all the crappy programs, apps and stuff that all OEMs install don't help either, but MS takes all the blame. Don't get me wrong, MS does create problems for themselves, but it's not always their fault. If you go to any of the OEM's websites and look for drivers, many of them haven't been updated in years. I've gone looking before and all the time I see drivers from 2016, or earlier, nothing newer and it's now 2019. So, I just go directly to the hardware vendor's site to get the most up to date version.