Drive prices are falling insanely fast even with all the chip shortages and shipping issues all over the world. I just got an 18TB drive (on sale) for $300 1 & 2 TB are under $50.
While I know that may be a lot of money for some people in parts of the world those are new prices. I have seen 1TB used for under $5 in places.
I agree, although it's different case if you need to host full node on remote server.
Time to download is probably not as big a concern then people who have bandwidth amount limited plans.
Aside from bandwidth, you also need to consider CPU speed, RAM capacity and HDD speed. HDD speed can be partially solved by moving
chainstate directory to SSD or allocate very big RAM to Bitcoin Core (IIRC at least 8GB).