First off, thanks for all the replies. I'm seeing a lot of Samsung and WD NVMe drives, a couple from other brands, a few Intel Optanes, some SATA drives, and one case of spinning rust
@PierreJG I applaud your patience, although admittedly I've only ever booted Windows off a HDD, Linux has always been on an SSD for me.
Secondly, the overall message I'm getting is that there's not much point upgrading to Gen 5, or even Gen 4 for that matter. That is kind of what I was thinking as well, but I did want to test the waters first
Thirdly, I looked at Optanes, and while their performance is really good, there are barely any available where I live, and those that are cost far more than I'd be willing to spend, especially for the limited amount of storage. Even though I don't install much on C:, games such as ETS/ATS and Ready Or Not love to store their mods on C:. They can be moved elsewhere, but in my experience it's finicky and some mods just won't work unless they're on C:.
I used to use a Sandisk SSD Plus as my boot drive, which is what this 970 Evo replaced. While not night and day, I did feel a difference going from one to the other, although I guess an OS reinstall probably also played a part in that... on the other hand, I used a PNY CS900 for years in my WFH PC, and that was as snappy as you like, even with it being paired with a 2500K!
Also turns out the slot I put my boot disk in is actually only Gen3x2 so I guess I am getting a free upgrade by moving it up a slot