A couple of thoughts on the UE5/SSD/Loading times ordeal:
First of all, I am very much of the idea that the Series X is a phenomenal console, so bear with me here those of you who have a preference for Xbox, even if I seem to praise PS5 and as try to unravel my thoughts on all of this. And feel free to correct me where I may be wrong, I'm surely going to be wrong in some things.
This whole "games 30/40 hour games won't be able to look like the tech demo" thing is debatable. Debatable from the point of view that I would think the magnitude that would be of importance would be size of scenarios/map, number of assets, not necessarily hours of gameplay. Meaning, you could do a 40 hour game on a fairly small map. What's to take into consideration when thinking about number of assets and quality of those assets is not the duration of the story, but the scenario the story takes place at. But, for the sake of my next argument, I'll indulge on it. And it might very well be a true statement, of course, I'm merely saying that I don't think it was properly presented to make the point they wanted to make.
And still, UE5 has tailored its I/O subsystems with PS5 in mind.
Now, even after we accept that big worlds cannot be made in that level of detail, and therefore, the SSD advantage from PS5 over Series X is dimmed, does that actually mean that the only difference that we would be able to extract are loading times? That the PS5 SSD won't be able to provide anything of value over what Series X can do?
The answer to those questions lies on what it is, in my opinion, the big paradigm shift that the PS5 SSD introduces. It's not about graphics, it's not about LOD, it's about game design.
Meaning, you could potentially design games that do things that the Series X absolutely can't, because of its speed. Something based on incredibly fast traversing, or something that needs of that speed to change scenarios in a blink of an eye, to put a couple of examples.
And, of course, here I'm taking into consideration first party games too, not just games made on UE5, but the point stands, that as I said, the big paradigm shift PS5 offers is game design, not loading times, not graphics. Those are aspects the Series X improves upon too, but, giving developers freedom to think outside of the box and come up with new ideas on how to leverage that speed and the usage of the SSD? That's PS5 territory, and it builds upon creativity, which is something of the utmost importance to me.
This is all my opinion, of course, but just saying that lower loading times is all the PS5 SSD can do, I think is dead wrong.