I agree about this. SSD leads to impressively fast boot/early load times, and it might help if you have to run workloads that stress both RAM and I/O, but other than that it doesn't really matter if you're running a proper OS. And you can put a swap file/partition on a spinning disk without worrying about endurance or having less space for files. So the performance argument goes both ways, and the extra storage space of spinning rust is very convenient.