It's a $1,700 bottom barrel android tablet, there is plenty of profit margin available.

That's where the wear levelling comes in, still expose 8GB of space to the host device, but internally have I dunno, twice that in cell capacity that you can move bits to as other cells wear out.

Its a shame mobile devices don't have a SMART equivalent, would be nice to have some warning as something approaches the end of its life.

If I remember correctly it's also about eMMC having a much shorter life than UFS or similar storage. Though yes, unnecessary logging isn't helpful either. (Quick post-googling edit: apparently both use NAND, it's more about wear leveling apparently that makes the differences.)