Everything beats CoD and Halo, but cool story.

Fast pace shooting and fun multiplayer action with your bros over a cold miller light. Nothing beats that.

Saying anything is over drinking cold water is not much of a bar.

A good night of sleep beats that, a good work out session beats it, well I could probably list dozen of stuff that do.

this narrative feels like the chad multiplayer gamer vs the virgin solo player or the other way around depending on the perspective

As per this dev, if third party will only bother focusing on the lowest common denominator, then the PS5 SSD won't be a benefit, but neither would the XBSX GPU. So either both boxes have certain higher specs for nothing, other than for first party titles, or those specific advantages will be put to use by third party in some instances.

I rather think both made good choices for their systems and that it will be meaningfull.

First we can gather the marketshare of the most popular vendors... Let's use wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_computer_vendors

So that means Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, Acer and Asus which accounts for 81.3% of the PC OEM market.

Then we trod over to each individual manufacturers website... Which is:

www.lenovo.com
https://store.hp.com
or www.dell.com

From there I will use something like Dell.com as it's got a decent sort function by hardware components.
And they only have 3x notebooks with a mechanical hard drive, the Dell Inspiron 14 5000 and 15 5000 models.

But then they have 23x models with a 128GB, 256Gb or 512GB SSD aka the Dell Inspiron 14 5000, 15 5000, XPS 13, Inspiron 15 7000, XPS 15, various 2 in 1's and so forth.

Even the shitty budget netbooks like the Dell Inspiron 15 3000 with an AMD A6 9220 has a 128GB SSD.

Are there PC's with mechanical drives being sold? Shit yes. But that are certainly the exception and not the norm.

Even Anandtech recognizes for end-user systems that SSD's are the main seller, not mechanical drives.
Mechanical drives still hold relevancy in cold storage/workstation/server markets where their capacity and long-term reliability without being powered on is highly valued.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12075/best-consumer-hdds

And I quote: "Data storage requirements have kept increasing over the last several years. While SSDs have taken over the role of the primary drive in most computing systems, hard drives continue to be the storage media of choice in areas dealing with large amount of relatively cold data."

I don't actually disagree. But if you still want the absolute best sheer sequential throughput, you can achieve that on PC, but expect to pay out of the nose for it.

Obviously there is allot that goes on "behind the scenes" when it comes to storage and Sony has invested a shit ton into working on that... If anything that will mean the rest of the industry will take note and start resolving those issues going forth, it's a good thing for the entire industry.

You would be relying on RAID. And with that... Exponential increases in costs and complexity, it's out of reach for pretty much every average user.
Although some notebooks, especially workstation class notebooks will allow you to Raid a heap of SSD's.

You can also go to say bestbuy's website which I'd consider to be one of the most popular stores that casual consumers would go to in order to purchase a laptop, search by lowest price and find that majority of the laptops have SSD/Flash storage of some kind. Some do have hard drives but most that have hard drives also have SSD storage for the OS. Only a few that are new are hard drives only.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/all-laptops/pc-laptops/pcmcat247400050000.c?id=pcmcat247400050000&qp=condition_facet%3DCondition~New%5Esoldout_facet%3DAvailability~Exclude%20Sold%20Out%20Items&sp=%2Bcurrentprice%20skuidsaas