I opened up my node to inbound connections last week.
A few months of uploading 500-1000+ GB per month might start to convince you that drastically increasing the amount of data required to keep the network running might not be such a great idea.
Perhaps. For the last several years, however, I've hardly noticed the presence. Typically fully opened, sometimes outbound only, sometimes running multiple nodes (production, development, test, core, classic, xt, bu)- not an issue. If it ever gets to be a strain, I'll throttle back from fully promiscuous (at the moment, I have 63 inbound connections) to something lower.
IOW: I can keep it up longer than you can hold your breath. Certainly long enough to resolve the current scaling solution impasse, AAR.