Just as a kind of update, the WD SSD has done great so far (still 100% healthy) but I wound up dropping 45 bucks on a
Samsung (1TB) 870 Evo.
Cloning was fairly boring (I used Macrium to do the job) and had the SSDs swapped in about an hour. Samsung also has its own dasboard proggy called
Magician and if you're on the fence between WD and Samsung, go with Samsung.
Magician has a lot more info it can display and some nifty performance options.
There's hardly any difference in operating temps (normal range between 28 to 32 C) between the two brands but Samsung has a bit of an edge on over-all performance. Magician also has a bundled cloning utility which I haven't tried yet, but it looks very similar to Macrium's utility.
So, SSDs over-all: Recommended.
There's that feeling that once you make the switch, there's no going back although I may re-purpose my newer old-school hard drives as long term (remote) secure storage.
As far as brands go, Samsung takes it. For casual gaming and "daily driver" use, Samsung has a "performance" mode that checks a lot of the boxes you want.