SSDs have been around for a long time, and have been affordable for quite a while now. While optimization should always be happening on the developer side, its not crazy to start requiring 30+ year old technology to use modern games.

Is it really an engineering problem to not prioritize a slower storage medium?

Last gen consoles still had HDDs but with the newer gen using SSDs that’s what they seem to go for, rather than HDDs and are using the faster read speeds available to them. So with the current gen in mind and SSDs becoming more common to me it makes sense in that regard.

Now don’t get me wrong here this doesn’t mean developers should use this as an excuse to not optimize their game. But I can see how it could let some be lazy about it and push the issue onto hardware.

And I do agree that gameplay is what makes or breaks it, not fancy graphics. It’s why indie games can be so popular even with pixel graphics (not that all use pixel but you get the idea). But that doesn’t seem to be what they were aiming for.