This is a little unusual. Most games never explicitly say you need an SSD or a HDD - but Starfield does! This likely isn’t a hard limit, as recommendations are often just that, but I cannot help but wonder what would happen if the game is run on an HDD?
As a long time follower of Bethesda, I’m not so sure.
Otherwise, I agree with your sentiment. I’m not saying it doesn’t make sense to use SSD’s at all, but I definitely personally feel like it is mostly bad developers leaning on the hardware rather than properly optimizing their games.
An example is that they’re already admitting that it will be locked to 30fps on consoles. That doesn’t tell me it is highly optimized, it tells me they are happy with lower framerates as long as it looks good. Once again, personal opinion.