> Is this a hallucination? What am I missing? Why would heavy reads generate writes?

I take it heavy reads means more stuff goes into RAM, meaning other stuff has to be cached?

I've got same question as GP: e.g. is there a way to set moderately fast consumer NVMe SSDs (I've got both a Samsung 990 Pro and a WD SN850X) in a complete read-only mode to prevent "wear"?

Good catch! Disk reads do generate writes to cache. But the cache itself is in RAM, not on disk. So it shouldn’t cause additional wear of SSD.

Spilling