It's about time. SSDs have been around a very long time, and without a supported way of swapping out the internal hard drive, console gamers are penalized with long waits vs PCs where SSDs have become fairly standard.
In terms of overall console failure rates and unhappy end users, it has to be a huge relief to the xbox and ps5 hardware dev teams to remove anything with moving parts. The long term reliability and failure rates for rotating 2.5/3.5" HDDs vs NVME SSD will be very different.
The limiting factor for SSD endurance is volume of writes, which can be very carefully controlled in a walled-garden console OS+app design. Ordinary consumers are already very unlikely to run into write-endurance issues with something like a samsung nvme m2.2280 512GB-1TB SSD in a desktop PC.
PS4s have been able to swap out their hard drive and it's fully supported. However, base model PS4s run it at SATA2 speeds no matter what's attached, with SATA3 only being supported on the Pro.
Getting SSD reliably and cheap in console quantity has been the problem before now. Prices have fluctuated considerably in the past few years as other big buyers like data centers are up large amounts of the relatively small amount of ssd production.
