That might change though as people start including video + data within papers and have new notebook formats that are live and contain docker containers/ipython, etc.
It's a shame we can't just mail these around.
I picked up 32TB for just under $500 with discount over the holiday that way.
The theory is that this is a form of market segmentation, where enthusiasts/companies are willing to pay more for a bare drive regular consumers.
For instance, I got all white label WD80EMAZs (256MB cache, non-SMR, same firmware as the Reds) in this batch, so I had to insulate the 3.3V pins.
There are also true Reds, 128MB and 512MB cache drives, helium filleds, 7.2K HGSTs slowed to 5.4K, and other variants.
Encrypted shards partially solves this, but then you hit the quandry of "But what if I have a shard of something illegal or undesired enough to upset the wrong people?" which has not been thoroughly tested in our legal system.