Faster console storage is usually described as shorter load times. Its larger effect was on how games are built, because the old storage speed had shaped level design itself.
Mechanical drives dictated the old techniques
A spinning drive reads quickly in sequence and slowly when jumping between locations. Game data was therefore laid out to be read in long predictable runs.
Assets were duplicated across the disc so that each area could be read contiguously, which is why installs grew far larger than the unique content required.
When the player could move faster than data could arrive, the game had to slow them down, and level design absorbed that requirement.
Corridors and elevators were loading in disguise
Narrow passages, slow doors, elevators and cutscenes existed partly to buy time. Each gave the engine seconds to stream the next area into memory.
They were designed to feel intentional, and often did, but the constraint was mechanical rather than artistic.
Removing the constraint does not remove the technique. Designers still use pacing devices, but they are now choices rather than requirements.
Solid-state storage changed the memory model
With storage fast enough to feed memory on demand, a console no longer needs to hold large speculative caches of what the player might reach next.
That frees memory for higher-detail assets in view, rather than lower-detail assets covering every direction the player might go.
It also makes rapid transitions viable, because an entirely different environment can be loaded in the time a screen fade takes.
Decompression moved into hardware
Game data is stored compressed, and at high read speeds a processor spends more time decompressing than reading. That would waste the drive's advantage.
Consoles therefore include dedicated decompression hardware sitting between storage and memory, handling the work without consuming general processing capacity.
This is why raw drive speed alone does not predict performance. The path from storage to memory matters as much as the storage itself.
Cross-generation development slowed the payoff
Games built to also run on older hardware must keep the old streaming assumptions, since the design has to work where the storage is slow.
The techniques therefore persisted for years after the hardware stopped requiring them, and the change appeared gradually rather than at launch.
The clearest evidence shows up in games built without that compatibility requirement, where traversal speed and world density both rise beyond what the previous generation supported.