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Looks like you've gotten a lot of responses from folks on this. The consensus seems to be SSDs all the way, with the caveat that you don't want to buy cheap ones. I'm gonna toss my 2 cents in anyway, though it's pretty late in the thread.

SSDs give you much better performance. There really is no comparison between SSDs and platters for access rates.

The issue of having limited numbers of writes to a given sector of the SSD is not as big a deal as it was when they were first introduced. If you've got developers who do a lot of compiling, and such, you might run up against those limits, but for regular users, it's probably not a big issue. I'd just factor that in to the equation for those users. Don't be overly surprised if they need a replacement before the useful life of the laptop is reached.

The price differential between the two types of storage is huge, especially if you're looking at needing a TB or more of space. That may matter for some users. The more actual disk space you need, the bigger the price differential between SSD and hard disks.

Regardless of the drive type, regular backups of user data is critical. For the OS and/or programs not so much. The backup device should be spinning disks. (IMO) I use a backup program that uses 'rsync' to perform daily backups. This is insanely efficient from a space perspective. Since I use Linux, it allows symlinks for files. This means the backup program doesn't have to copy the actual data for a file that already exists and has not changed. Do not know if a similar program is available for Windows. To give you an idea how efficient this backup mechanism is, I have a 4TB backup drive. My home partition is 3.6TB, and currently has 737GB of data used. My backup drive has 30 full backups of my data on it going back to 2016. Even with 30 full backups, I've only used 2TB of space on that backup. That equals 22TB of backups in that 2TB of space. (my data doesn't change all that much on a daily basis). Backups are important enough to do religiously. If you don't back up your stuff, you deserve to lose it.

On my desktop, I have a smallish SSD for the OS and programs, and a much larger hard drive for my data. On a laptop, multiple drives probably aren't an option. I really don't worry about my boot drive. If it fails, I'll go buy another, and load the OS/apps on it and move on. I have backups of everything that is important, including offsite storage of monthlies.