How is he an asshole? He was sold the service, and he used it properly, the terms of service were followed. If anything, this story shows that Backblaze sucks at providing said service.
Unlimited bandwidth, free drinks, unlimited storage, etc., are all offered with some expectation of limits, with occasional spikes in use.
But let's back up a moment. 17TB is a lot of data. If you were a professional photographer or videographer, I could possibly imagine that need. Or if you were doing some truly big data work, or some financial algo backtesting (on a really grand scale), maybe. Those people should be able to afford storage prices in line with their amount of data.
Secondly, assume you lost your local drive. How are you going to restore 17TB? Whose network (that you're taking advantage of) are you going to saturate with your restore?