the "industry hearsay" from two replies above mine is about deliberate data duplication to account for the spinning platters in HDD (which isn't entirely correct, as the team on Helldivers 2 have realized)
This has nothing to do with consoles, and only affects PC builds of the game
So the PS5's SSD architecture was what developers were familiar with when they tried to figure out what changes would be needed to make the game work on PC.
Maybe you're saying the hearsay was Sony exaggerating how bad hard drives are? But they didn't really do that, and the devs would already have experience with hard drives.
If the Helldivers devs were influenced by what Sony said, they must have misinterpreted it and taken away an extremely exaggerated impression of how much on-disk duplication was being used for pre-SSD game development. But Sony did actually say quite a bit of directly relevant stuff on this particular matter when introducing the PS5.
But uh if the devs didn't realize that, I blame them. It's their job to know basics like that.