Currently (2023) full ledger is about 435 Gb. Bandwidth consumption of 200G/month in UPLOADS is reported norm, if left unchecked. I feel a systemic risk to the network that may drift momentum towards large users with unlimited storage and bandwidth in a way that may jeopardize security and decentralized nature of the network.
That number probably from very early 2023. Blockchain size on my device is 528GB, which exclude chainstate folder and other files.
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.
All of them all critical if you want to verify everything is valid (e.g. make sure UTXO has correct amount).
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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 before, and my response is the same: I'd spin up thousands of cloud nodes for profit 
Even worse, write script which used to spin fake nodes to lower operational cost.