I believe that you have to have installed High Sierra on the Mac at least once for the new hard drive to even detect. After installation, I enabled trim via trimforce. I didn't need insulated tape for the connector. I needed the longer screw provided in the adapter kit. My personal experience involved installing the new drive, having the web recovery fail, reinstalling the old drive, downloading the Mojave upgrade and following the usb bootable creation process, and then reinstalling the new drive and doing the Mojave install. Installation requires a little finesse, but ifixit covers the process well enough.

Contrast to OWC drives currently running for 250 USD and the Transcend one running for 300 USD. I bought the Samsung 960 EVO 500GB to go with it. I have a 2014 MacBookPro11,1 (13 inch, Mid 2014) and I bought the NGFF M.2 PCIE adapter that Sintech makes for mine. The form factor is different but there's a Chinese company Sintech that makes various adapters to fix this issue. Read/write and boot-up work on 2013-2014 MBPs. Since the release of High Sierra there's been some support put in for NVMe drives. It's 2018 and I think the answer to this question has changed. Here's the direct Amazon Store that Transcend forwards you to in the link above. Most importantly, it looks like they offer a scan to confirm the proper upgrade for your specific model. (it's not out of stock, btw.) Except you get a couple extra goodies like an USB 3.0 enclosure for the drive you replace, tools, replacement guide, screws, rubber feet, etc. I recommend checking out Transcend's JetDrive since it's a comparable price to the ifixit link. Which means it's going to be more expensive off the bat since it's not in 'high' demand and even more so since the seller probably knows it's intended for a MacBook.

The only way to upgrade your MacBook (or more recent ones) is to buy an uncommon PCIe x2 SSD. That being said, a simple answer to your question is, no.

We are talking about an Apple product though and it goes without saying that nothing is going to be standard or easy. Many ultrabooks use this connection and you can easily buy adapters for regular laptops. MSATA's are incredibly universal and on par with the standard SSD pricing. The recent ones don't have the 'easy' mSATA upgrade. I can personally confirm this info since I've worked on several dozen (retail returned) MacBooks over the past year and a half. This likely being the 'easy upgrade' you mentioned. MacBook Pro's haven't had a standard mSATA connection since 2013.

Macbook pro mid 2013 ssd upgrade