Unless the game is a very narrow tunnel that go into in a single path in one direction, random reads are going to happen regularly. Even if you store things in a sequential manner, the chances of being able to access them in a sequential manner is really small. It's not like you can pick and choose what kind of reading you will do at any given time. The nature of games is that they are dynamic, you have freedom of interaction within the frame of the game, and that is what will produce the randomness of data access. You can't program around this, although there might be some way to slightly mitigate it.
HDDs work very differently from SSDs. The only way to increase the SSD speed to reach close to its max capacity is to basically perform sequential reads as much as possible. But that would kind of kill the exact freedom that SSDs are able to provide.
Not sure what you're getting at here, but, the SSD being slower with random reads than sequential ones is not some sort of software limit nor is it really dependent on platform.
If you had a set distance from A to B, and every meter there is an apple placed on the ground with a sequential number from 2 to 12, it will always be faster to collect all the apples in order, either from 2 to 12 or from 12 to 2, since you will be collecting them in a straight path. But even if they are placed sequentially, if you have to collect the apples in the order of dice rolls, it will always take longer, because you will have to walk a lot more by going back and forth, you will have results of apples you already collected, and it will be a lot longer before you are done. It doesn't matter if the apples are placed on concrete, grass or sand. It will always take longer.
As for the PS5 vs XSX SSD... Maybe you're a much better sprinter than I am for straight lines on a running court, but if we both need to roll the dice to collect all the apples, the difference will be quite a lot smaller.
