That's fair, but as long as you packed your assets correctly it was bearable for the time IMO. So much available storage meant that you could duplicate textures instead of seeking all over the disc for instance.
Also streaming assets was rather uncommon at the time, Naughty Dog is really pushing the envelope here. It was especially uncommon because most games streamed the background music in real time straight from the CD, so if you wanted to side-load assets on demand you had to be very clever about it lest the audio got interrupted.
As a result you generally had long loading times at the start of levels but that's about it. Some games were really bad about it though, and had long loading times all over the place (some even when you do something as trivial as opening a menu) but that could generally be attributed to shoddy programming, not a weakness of the console per-se. Overall I think in hindsight the decision to use a disc drive was the right one and cartridges ended up being a rather severe liability for Nintendo at that time, although of course it's far from the only factor at play when comparing the successes of both consoles.
I never owned a PSX, but my impression is that a lot of games did that thing where the actual game content was a few dozen MB at most, and the rest of the disc was either empty or used for background music, FMVs, etc.
Also streaming assets was rather uncommon at the time, Naughty Dog is really pushing the envelope here. It was especially uncommon because most games streamed the background music in real time straight from the CD, so if you wanted to side-load assets on demand you had to be very clever about it lest the audio got interrupted.
As a result you generally had long loading times at the start of levels but that's about it. Some games were really bad about it though, and had long loading times all over the place (some even when you do something as trivial as opening a menu) but that could generally be attributed to shoddy programming, not a weakness of the console per-se. Overall I think in hindsight the decision to use a disc drive was the right one and cartridges ended up being a rather severe liability for Nintendo at that time, although of course it's far from the only factor at play when comparing the successes of both consoles.