Why in the world would a modern operating system not optimize for SSDs?
I can’t think of a single reason to use a spinning drive on my computer. Almost every conceivable use case is better relegated to a separate NAS box.
You can get a 1TB PCIe nvme SSD rated at 3100Mbps read speeds for $125. Why would I chip off an order of magnitude of performance to save $40?
Sure, things have gotten more advanced, but it feels like the speed improvements of hardware are being used for bloat, rather than making computers even faster.
It seems computer performance stabilizes at a level that's acceptable to most people, I guess because beyond that there's no incentive to spend resources improving something that's acceptable.
By the way, 10 seconds clocked on a stopwatch is a ridiculously long time. Almost no apps open that slowly, in 2009 or 2021.
Storing the same data on a hard drive can be had for about $140. Now the SSD is much safer for your data, performs far better, and you absolutely ought to want the SSD but its not a small difference once you start talking about storing more than your OS. Spinning hard drives as OS drives ought to be completely dead by now but vendors are absolutely selling machines configured with them new in box all day every day. Seemingly more so on desktop or all in one models.