Basically every sentence you wrote there is wrong.
Yes - you have to worry about SSD write cycles.
No - HDDs do not have limited write cycles.
Early SSDs have much better write endurance than modern SSDs. Each new SSD cell generation has worse endurance ratings than previous one.
SLC - have best endurance, MLC -worse, TLC - worse, QLC - the worst.
All SSDs have wear leveling. It is not something only newest SSDs would have.
Incorrect. No you don't have to worry. Any drive made past 2012 has had wear-levelling and spare area allocated as standard. The BX500 is no exception. As the flash cells wear out, they are automatically replaced by ones from the spare area. Additionally, the drive controller spreads the writes evenly over all of the flash cells so that one particular chip or page is not being written to all of the time. I have spent more time researching and discussing this PC issue than any other, and it is amazing how many people still don't get it.
HDDs wear out same as any mechanical equipment. the more you write to it the more you wear out the write heads. Simple physics. You could write to a HDD continuously for 10 years before it wore out. Much the same as a modern SSD.
I think you're confusing "Early" with your idea of Early. I'm talking about the 2008 drives with JMicron controllers, e.g:
These were the drives that gave SSDs their "limited write cycles, bursts into flames if you defrag it or use it for Swap file" reputation. And rightly so, they were awful.
SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC, all of these are totally meaningless to consumers. All of them will perform the exact same in Windows. The only people who it really makes a difference to are the Infrastructure engineers at banks, power stations or airport control towers, who need to KNOW that their solid state drive is not going to fail when used in a high-volume transactional database. If you're running a SAN device on FreeBSD, or a high-volume transactional database server, then sure, maybe worry about what type of chips your SSD has. Windows 11 will not wear out a QLC drive, no matter how many times you delete and reinstall Skyrim.
All SSDs do not have wear levelling. It was introduced in 2009 and didn't become mainstream until 2010. There are still some older drives out there that will write to the same section of the same chip over and over and over until it pops. Back in 2009 / 2010 this added further fuel to the "My SSD is gonna asplode!!!1!" paranoid fear.
None of those drives are for sale any more, so you're right it's ridiculous in 2021 to be worrying about limiting writes to your SSD. Anyone who does this is wasting their time massively and worrying about something that's never going to happen.
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