It's also a substantial commitment in storage, bandwidth and increased need for security.
You need security for your funds, but it's less important for your node. If it gets compromised, nothing is lost.Quote
there's also a possibility of network somehow compensating those who maintain full ledger. I wonder if this has ever been pondered : can it be done in a way that would incentivize it for individual, independent users vs corporate agents with quasi-unlimited resources ? What are the downsides and upsides beyond obvious ?
This has been discussed, and my response is the same: I'd spin up thousands of cloud nodes for profit 
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Currently (2023) full ledger is about 435 Gb.
Actually, it's 100 GB more by now.Quote
Bandwidth consumption of 200G/month in UPLOADS is reported norm, if left unchecked.
I have a full node limited to 0.5 TB per day (as a precaution) in uploads. Since May 8, it has uploaded only 2.17 TB. That's 800 GB per month. This tells me Bitcoin doesn't have a shortage in upload bandwidth.Quote
On other hand, how critical is most of that data to stability and security of the blockchain ? Perhaps my concerns are out of ignorance and it will do just fine when less then 0.01% of all self-hosted nodes maintain a full copy.
I expect a much larger percentage of Bitcoin users to keep a full node. Obviously, I'm not counting the "Bitcoin users" who only buy and keep Bitcoin at exchanges.One of the options I have considered in the past is to find a way to distribute the original/full copy of the Bitcoin blockchain on cheap storage devices for offline sharing worldwide. People can just buy or get them for free, install on their computers and join the Bitcoin Network. But I think it would be necessary for the offline copies to be verified as authentic before they are allowed to become part of the Network. Maybe hashing the full copy of the Blockchain and verifying the hash, or/and resyncing would solve this.
That would only be useful in places with limited internet access, and for those places, downloading up to 0.5 GB per day just to keep the node updated may be too much already.so concentrate on debates about bringing the cost of using bitcoin down becasue the cost of storing bitcoin is not unmanageable
It goes hand in hand though: if Bitcoin blocks would be an order of magnitude larger, transactions would be cheap for a while, but the required storage would grow much faster.