yeah, and the only reason hard drives have been viable for games for so long is that consoles had slow storage so cross-platform games needed to be able to work with it. pc gamers will literally complain about consoles holding games back and then complain about games running poorly on their 10 year old hard drive when consoles aren't holding games back anymore.
Same, it's pretty much unplayable on an HDD, buttery smooth on my SSD though. I feel like it needs to be a rather loud PSA/notice on store pages about it.
I run Starfield on a 7700x with 6750XT, 32 gb, Samsung ssd and a freesync oled and it is not flawless at all. It's alright but framerates are all over the place. In gunfights with many enemies fps drops and input lag occurs making it hard to aim for instance. In denser enviroments it is starting to drop frames a la fallout 4, and in 2023 that is still a big problem even on recent systems.
My friend runs it on a 7900xtx and although he has an awesome rig, Starfield is all over the place with fps. No steady frame rates. He can run it 'flaweless' though, but it requires more than just an SSD, but a very expensive rig as well.