Most of your posts were covered by both MS and Sony in different articles/presentations. Particularly, the limits of regular HDDs when it comes to game design, and not just about hardware/software improvements due to speeds.
HDDs are so so very slow, but basically required, to ensure level of detail and assets that wasn't possible before. When designing your game you need to take into account the current limits of your memory and how you handle assets. This was also discussed during development of Spiderman for PS4. When you design and area, assets, the whole level you need to decide what goes into RAM and what gets stuck in the HDD. Naturally you can't fit the entire level on RAM (specially open world games) but you can save specific size, vertices and general geometry and only load relevant assets onto RAM from where the player is interacting. You can cull/remove everything out of sight or blocked, to ensure you are not wasting memory and performance there.
However, HDDs are hella slow compared to what current hardware can do. We are talking mere hundred MB/s at best, less than half at worst. They also have added latency for seek times, as you need actions to spin the disc, locate the memory map, locate file, and transfer it. This data also was compressed, so you needed to decompress the data before using it. This meant that if you needed any sort of information such as music/sound, graphics, geometry, sequences etc, that the player suddenly triggered, then you better have that on RAM, or else you will be stuck several seconds just finding and loading that (a typical simple example is pop-in, where textures, geometry, entire levels or triggered sequences get stuck loading and then BAM they appear infront of you).
This meant that your games will be limited in interaction because you can never have something too weird triggered by the player/user that needs non-loaded assets. Because of this, level design and general game design had to take into account areas or places to keep the player busy without them noticing too much, and keep loading/streaming data behind them. The infamous examples are "Press button for 5 seconds" or "walk slowly behind this corridor" type of stuff. Or simply, making a level have a weird/longer walking/running area used to mask asset streaming from behind. Another example of being limited by HDD is travel speed- you can't travel faster than what is being loaded/rendered. Open world games often limit your max speed of travel because you would run into weird glitches of non rendered parts and full of pop in. Infamous second son is an example of this, when using the neon dash for super fast running- it's supposed to be like lightning but it just feels like you are running faster than regular.
Basically- Game design up until now has been done considering the entire limits of the HDD medium. This means that SSDs up until now have only been used as supper HDDs, and never really taken into account when designing a game properly (a notable exception might be Star Citizen, as the game literally drops framerate when using HDD instead of SSD).
In theory, next gen games, as devs get the hang of it, will develop games that take into account the existence of SSDs. This might mean that new games in PC might also start having recommended/minimum requirements to HAVE and SSD, let alone a fast one. We might have new settings in the form of "asset streaming speed" that will depend on how fast your SSD is. And all of this will be taken into account when designing a game from scratch.
All that wall of text.... and THEN you have other improvements and detriments- not relying on HDD means data no longer needs to be duplicated. It is shown by Insomniac devs that Spiderman had over 10GB out of 45GB of the game being entirely duplicated data. Meaning the game itself could have been just 35GB had it been made for an SSD.
Anyways, I do believe the inclusion of a forced SSD in next gen consoles, even if 1TB or slightly less, was the right call. It will ensure new game design and performance to remain fast throughout the gen, even when graphics are no longer as capable. You can still use external HDDs on next gen consoles as way of BC with current consoles, and there will certainly be games that don't use the SSD so you might be able to install them to HDDs.
As for PC? I don't think a particular speed of SSD will be required at first, but obviously NVMe drives will have greater impact. SATA SSDs will probably be "required" for some next gen multiplatform games. I am looking forward to it. Imagine your current performance in games, but the single change of having a super fast SSD, means you can keep your current performance and simply dramatically increase world detail without pop in.
This also means, for PC, that we will require even faster/multicore CPUs. Unlike consoles, we don't have custom hardware decompression and handling of data- we do all with our CPUs. I bet quad cores are finally going to get choked.
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