Valid and with the amount of bloat windows 11 comes with i cant see myself getting a 500gb now. I do usually run chris titus’s scrpits for debloating but yes as you said there are fewer games below 100gigs now than before.I don't understand the trend of listing mid-high range motherboard with a low range processor. Even the most basic motherboard chipset supporting Ryzen 5000 series can run processor up to 5800x without any issue. It's simply a waste of money to have good motherboard but not good processor to take advantage of it.
Having good motherboard was kind of a requirement back in the days as good VRMs were needed to overclock the processors and/or sustain full load for longer duration of period but things have come a long way since then. These days even the most basic motherboards come with something like 6+1+1 VRM setup which has smoother load distribution and most cabinets are not air starved metal boxes anymore so there is a constant airflow going through the VRMs keeping them cool.
The only use case for a low end processor + high end motherboard that I can think of is in case you will be upgrading the processor soon or if you get the combo as a good second-hand deal.
You will definitely feel that 500GB storage of yours getting full after installing windows + a few games. Lets do some rough maths. 500GB SSD will actually have usable storage of 465GB-476GB out of which 50-60GB will be used by windows OS itself. Minus 10-20GB for additional softwares that you might want to keep on your PC. Minus 200 GB for 4-6 games. You said you play red dead redemption right? Well if you are talking about the 2nd one thats 150 GB alone. You are barely looking at 200GB of space left that is assuming you don't keep any media files like movies on your PC. Get a 1TB SSD trust me.
SLC drives are the best but also the most expensive so it's okay to go for MLC or TLC or for such tight budget like yours even QLC (which is what Crucial P3 plus has).
On the motherboard end also i am seeing some deals on 620m boards. I was thinking that with an entry am5 Cpu like 8400f could leave me some room for upgradability down the line. I still need to keep it all under 60k for this build.
But do let me know if I’m wrong.