Indeed, as others have said this isn't a hard requirement. Anyone with a handheld (e.g. Steam Deck) playing off a uSD card uses a device that's an order of magnitude slower for sequential I/O

It's not a hard requirement.

Both Cyberpunk and BG3 work flawlessly on the external USB hard drive that I use. The loading times suffer a bit, but not to an unplayable degree, not even close

Cyberpunk literally has an HDD mode, I play it of an HDD every day.

With sufficient ram to load everything in you'll just have longer load times, no hdd hitchiness

Forza Horizon 4 and 5 don't say they require an SSD I think, but when I had it on my hard drive any cars that did over 250kph caused significant world loading issues, as in I'd fall out of the world because it didn't load the map.