I'm confused. NVMe supports either SATA or PCIe connections depending on the key of the slot. And the drive in question appears to support PCIe connection to the housing based on the text of the article. What situation are you in that neither of these options works?

FYI. it's M.2 connector that can support SATA or PCIe (or even USB, with A or E key). NVMe is a protocol or command set that runs over some physical interface, like PCIe, RDMA, FC or TCP.

So you can have M.2 SATA (not NVMe) or M.2 PCIe (NVMe) drives, both in the bubblegum form factor. The drive from the article uses U.2 connector, which also provides SATA and PCIe (some desktop boards did come with such a connector, parallel with M.2 slot).

I have a consumer motherboard. I have a hard time getting large drives that are fast enough if I am not willing to spend a lot money on server hardware.

First you need a u2 card (or whare er new standards there are)that works and then you need actual u2 drives which are friggin expensive.

With storage density reaching tens of terabytes per drive, sata 6gbit is not enough.

Just get a PCIe card that does U.2 and you're usually good. You can buy some of these 15.36 TB capacity drives second hand.