This is likely just something that corporate users would care about. Companies often lease PCs from IT service providers rather than own and maintain their own hardware. The owner of the hardware now has a metric they can point to for how "usable" a machine is after the initial lease. As a customer, I may not want to rent laptops that have been through who knows what sort of wear and tear no matter how cheap but if the owner can now show me actual data saying how used the laptop is, I may feel more comfortable paying less for used. It's like the odometer on a car, I'd never buy a used car that didn't have an odometer (even if such a thing existed). But with an odometer, I can get a general idea of how much use a car has had despite the age. Only a year old with 30k miles? Hell no. Three years old with only 10k? That car might as well be new.

I'm assuming since it writes to a vendor-reserved sector, replacing it would make the whole thing moot. The rental company wants to retain that data because it makes a used PC more valuable. Since the corporate renter doesn't own the PC, they would only be allowed to wipe the SSD (excluding this section), not remove and destroy it.