Writes are still mostly sequential. Most nvme vendors when publishing random I/O numbers, are talking about writes.

There are other concerns with writes that are not performance-related, but for instance, durability: if you do random writes to the middle of a file and crash in the middle, good luck with your data =)

Another aspect is that logs often allow for buffering, which gives you an opportunity for deduplication.

So I still think writes are mostly better done linearly, but performance is not the reason.