I got tired of reading storage debates built entirely on spec sheets, so I compared a fast Gen 5 drive against a good Gen 4 drive in the stuff I actually do every day.

Boot times barely moved. Game load times changed by a second here, two seconds there. Big project file moves and cache-heavy work absolutely favored the Gen 5 drive, but the "night and day" upgrade some marketing suggests just was not there for normal gaming use. The other thing nobody mentions enough is heat. The Gen 5 drive ran noticeably hotter and made me care a lot more about airflow than I wanted to.

My current opinion is boring: if you need massive sequential throughput for work, sure, Gen 5 has a place. If this is mostly a gaming box, I would still take more capacity on a strong Gen 4 drive before paying extra just to win a benchmark graph.