The controller would still know what size should be there because the EEPROM is still fine, but the NAND isn’t. I think that’s what the no media errors would mean, as I’ve seen it plenty with external enclosure where the drive itself was completely dead but the controller still was working fine. I imagine flash controllers report the condition similarly at the protocol level.
Regular flash failures I’ve always seen as corrupted data or IO errors on it, which it also throws plenty of.