The school system I work for has thousands of devices with these. They're basically like an SD card for a camera soldered to the board. They do not have the wear leveling and other shit a real SSD has.

They're slow, (comparatively) unreliable and small. Because they're on the board a bad one means a new mobo which is generally not cost effective so it's done. I hate them and the cheap shitty hardware that they come with.

I'd like to point out that these came before Chromebooks but Chromebooks are also using them because they use the same shitty hardware as the cheapest Windows devices.

Even high-end, well-regarded Chromebooks use eMMC storage - e.g. the “base” $1k+ Pixelbook models.

The current eMMC spec is for 400 MB/s, plenty fast for low-end laptop.

The devil is in the details, as with other kinds of SSD.