Games with complicated or involved stories just need to go back to having a comprehensive log or journal. That used to be a staple of big games, to the point where it could take you days to read all the lore and journal entires. That might not be fully ideal for those adult gamers either but theres definitely a comfortable middle ground where your active missions page has a little brief for each objective telling you who gave the quest, what they wanted and why. Lots of games these days can have like 20 active quest markers and give you no information about any of them beyond some random npc you talked to once wants 10 of something for some reason.

I expected a much bigger hit to performance when i got a 1TB sd card for my steamdeck and initially only was putting small indie games on there, but after gradually moving up to higher performance games and not really noticing a hit, i just throw everything on there now. I think most games these days are more limited by other factors than storage speed.