You have an option to extend the fast storage on Xbox, it isn't cheap but an option is better than no option.
it is cheaper to get an XSX and a better choice to boot. Still, sure not that unexpected considering it is proprietary storage.
You do realise that all the games on Series S so far have come out on Xbox One S? Developers are already used to different profiles since the PS4 pro years ago, you claim developers are "struggling" with the Lockhart profile, where is your evidence of this? The Scorn developer denied it, the Ori developer denied it. Devs I bet were struggling far more to deliver these games on One S, see Cyberpunk for details.
Ok, since developers are not publicly complaining about tools, we can throw away that feel good FUD that tools are behind and massive gains are waiting on future sunlit uplands
. BTW, there were some developers that complained publicly (before their company got purchased by MS and had to delete their tweets), but you can keep ignoring that if you want.
Bringing Xbox One X and PS4 Pro does not actually do more than proving my point: consoles that used their brute forced to deliver cheap patches and kept the platform alive for a bit longer while waiting for the new generation machines to hit. That is the case of the higher end HW likely under-utilised to ensure the base console version (which were the lead platforms) would run well.
CP2077 is the other case, the case where you start from the higher end version and work your way down (and have tons of very experienced people at it for lots of years, so yeah burning up quite a lot of money there too)... and performance on base consoles (and bugs showed.
You can run some Series optimised games from an external also, quite a few in fact. Click file info on the game tile and if it says Durango it will run from an external, hope that saves you some space.
Also loading times aren't "undermined" by using an external, I use and external SSD on my Series S and tests by DF show clearly on backwards compatible games the difference between that and running from the internal was miniscule, you still got big gains on old titles.
Sure, the more you spend on an external HDD/SSD solution the better it is, but it still not the same even if you spend more and those few extra seconds in a game like Deadly Premonition (and others) for example matter to me.
If you use an external storage for archiving purposes and re not willing to spend close to the cost of the SSD stick MS sells you you are undermining loading times.
Also, not interested in running optimised for Series X games on external storage tricking the system, not why I bought a next generation machine and this XVA bit for
.