As best as I can tell, SECURE ERASE still exists in DISK UTILITY . . . but only for external thumb and hard drives.
Secure erase of a thumb drive will reduce its lifespan but with externally connected drives MacOS sees only the logical structure of the drive and has no way of knowing what the physical media is. A thumb drive looks like rotating rust and vice-versa.
If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?
