This hasn't been my experience; I see much higher sequential read results compared to random reads on a wide range of storage from low-end home PC SSDs to high

This hasn't been my experience; I see much higher sequential read results compared to random reads on a wide range of storage from low-end home PC SSDs to high end NVME flash storage in large servers. It's certainly not true on actual hard drives, and never has been. A seek is around 10ms.