I assume asset reads nowadays are much heavier than 4 kB though, specially if assets meant to be loaded together are bundled together in one file. So games now should be spending less time seeking relative to their total read size. Combined with HDD caches and parallel reads, this practice of duplicating over 100 GBs across bundles is most likely a cargo-cult by now.

Which makes me think: Has there been any advances in disk scheduling in the last decade?