What I described is 100% how it works. Why do you think all of the older titles require major patches in order to take better advantage of the ssd? And even when they do it's usually far from taking full advantage. You think all of these games are being deliberately held back so that playing them on next gen is worst than it could be?

Think of a standard desktop PC, you just can plug in better components and get better performance out of your bottlenecks.

The difference between upgrading a pc and the jump from ps4-ps5 isnt even close. The ps5 has a customer desinged ssd, with dedicated pieces of hardware to help remove bottlenecks. This new hardware doesnt just magically work. It's the same as any new piece of hardware, like the audio chip and ray tracing units. You cant just put the new hardware in and expect 3D audio and ray tracing in old games.

It works the way you described, but not nearly to the level of what Insomniac has done in Spider-Man. The ssd will improve speeds a bit, but if you want to take full advantage of the ssd's potential the additional dedicated hardware will need to be used, and to do that large changes are needed. This is why there are less than a handful of games that currently do this.