There was no relaunch.

The figures probably were right at the time (you may not have noticed this thread is very old), but that shows the irrelevance of the issue.

The original open source pool code was extraordinarily inefficient in making tiny payouts to every single miner (could be hundreds or even thousands) for every single block. That caused enormous bloating of the chain. Once that got fixed a few months after AEON launch the chain bloat largely disappeared. So while there might have been 1 GB in the first month, after 1.5 years it is only 3.4 GB (smaller with pruning).

As you say, the size is very manageable. I recently downloaded Fallout 4 at >20 GB for one video game.