Most of the time the HD grind is caused by Chrome scanning my files, but still, I wonder if all the verbose logging and tracking that Win 10+ does now is what made them recommend upgrading to SSDs for the OS'es.
I'm also pretty sure that Win11 has a lot of structural changes made to eventually inject ads into everything as a back-up MS-Revenue Stream plan, so I'll wait for the usual mandatory to update anyway, after there is no longer a choice.
Maybe it's their devs not having HDDs anymore. Who knows. I'm pretty sure it's not the volume of data being read/written. Just a lot of more smaller reads/writes or less attempts at latency-hiding.
Be it the anti-malware, less carefully written system apps or whatever. I think especially XAML stuff had terrible start-up times on HDDs. I remember filing a feedback item because after booting up my laptop it took more than 40s to open up calculator.