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).
Going to have to disagree with you here.
With unlimited bandwidth I can sync a node from scratch on an 4GB RPi4 with a 5400 RPM USB drive in under a week.
Using an SSD will get that down to 4 days or so. Literally just did both with Umbrel builds.
Yes if you need it up now, a week is an intolerably long time. If you just want to run a node, you can start it and walk away and come back next weekend and it should be done.
-Dave