The assumption that "find" performance is dominated by disk IOPS is not generally valid.

For instance, I normally compile big software projects in RAM disks (Linux tmpfs), because I typically use computers with no less than 64 GB of DRAM.

Such big software projects may have very great numbers of files and subdirectories and their building scripts may use "find".

In such a case there are no SSD or HDD I/O operations, everything is done in the main memory, so the intrinsic performance of "find" may matter.