The wide variety of controller/memory combinations makes it quite a moving target.
This is the "mass production" software that makes it possible to provision, partition, format, and even place pre-arranged data or OS's in position before shipping freshly prepared drives to a bulk OEM customer. On one or more "identical" drives at the same time.
For USB flash thumb drives the same approach is used. Factory software like this which is capable of modifying the firmware of the device is unfortunately about the only good way to determine the page size and erase block size of a particular USB drive. If the logical sectors storing your information are not aligned with the physical memory blocks (which somewhat correspond to the "obsolete" CHS geometry), the USB key will be slower than necessary, especially on writes. Due to write-amplification, and also it will wear out much sooner.
Care does not go into thumb drives like you would expect from SSDs, seems like very often a single SKU will have untold variations in controller/memory chips. Also it seems likely that during the production discontinuities when the supply of one of these ICs on the BOM becomes depleted, it is substituted with a dissimilar enough chip that a revision of the partitioning, formatting, and data layout would be advised, but does not take place because nobody does it. And it still works anyway so nobody notices or cares. Or worse, it's recognized as an engineering downgrade but downplayed as if in denial. Wide variation in performance within a single SKU is a canary for this, which can sometimes be rectified.
Wish I had a bunch of spare time to burn on stuff like this. :)