There’s always the option of gathering device info first, then using the appropriate driver. Either the SSD is in a “known supported models” list, or it reports support for whatever feature the new driver needs.

It’s technically possible that straight up trying an unsupported driver can cause physical damage, but this can be avoided by carefully selecting the driver. From MS pov, they’d have to extensively test this driver on a bunch of SSDs and configurations, but it would lead to a performance improvement.

And obviously, there’s been no possible way to try loading the modern driver and if that fails, falling back to the legacy one.

This is once again Microsoft refusing to improve performance, because that doesn’t directly increase profits.