You can easily put any soft starter inside of any sealed enclosure you like, as long as you use a bypass contactor once it is done ramping so that it doesn't over heat in the box. Years ago mfrs used to offer small soft starters with external heat sinks in higher IP /NEMA rated enclosures to avoid needing the bypass contactor, but that technology stopped at around 75HP because it requires isolated SCRs. Then as mentioned, VFDs all but wiped out that small power marketplace by being cheaper than soft starters, and having to maintain two different heat sink designs is expensive, so that has pretty much gone away since you can just use a bypass of you need to.
The reason you see VFDs in pre-packaged high IP/NEMA enclosures is because with VFDs, there is no option for bypass to overcome the heat issues, so the only path is a different heat sink.
By the way, NEMATODE is a type of worm, NEMA is the acronym. Likely your spell check did that for you though...