Agreed, for access times, load times and general smoothness of use, you need a reconfigure, and it's not as expensive as you think.
If you're happy with the size and speed of your main OS drive, then it's just your storage and gaming drive(s) you need to consider, use the 1TB HDDs you have purely for archival storage, for things you don't access much, such as movies, document storage etc.
To answer your initial question, no, SMR drives are not considered or thought of very highly, because they are nothing more than a cost cutting exercise, using cheaper materials and methods at the cost of longevity and reliability, the manufacturers bean counters have done the math and decided that an acceptable number of failures for which they will have to pay out is still within their profit vs cost matrix and will tell you that its a very low percentage of users/drives that will be affected, but, that's only inside the warrantied period, and we all know we use drives etc much longer than this - personally, i will never fit SMR drives, just like i refuse to use QVO SSDs
For your Game Library, if it gets accessed frequently, and often for smaller files etc, then an Optane drive would be good, as these have amazing access times, however, they are now discontinued in desktop form and can be quite expensive.
You don't say what hardware setup you have, so i'm not sure if you have a second m.2 drive slot available, i'm assuming the primary is NVMe, and that should also be the first choice for your new games drive(s), if you don't have that option, then 2.5" SATA SSDs would be the next choice (not withstanding option below often overlooked)
Now you said you have a couple of HDDs for your games library, so it sounds like you overshot one drives capacity previously, so you'd need to look for the current sweet spot cost wise for SSD's regardless of your type selection, there is always going to be a sweet spot where say doubling the drive size suddenly costs double the price, so just before this is usually where I look, and then consider if I need 1 or 2, or more, this of course could be restrained by hardware limitations such as number of sockets/connections etc.
Don't forget the OCUK clearance section, some cracking deals can also be found in there.
Clearance Deals - HDDs + SSDs
There is also one other option not mentioned that often, commonly overlooked, and usually associated with being used for the main OS drive, but, if picked up cheaply enough they make good games storage drives, and these are PCI-E SSD-add-in cards, and occasionally they pop up in the members market and can be a good cost vs size/performance balance. For example........
Samsung PM1725b 6.4TB PCI-E AIC that's probably worth a closer look.
