You had a community-driven quota system.
It's basically reserving part of the disk for very important things only, which scares off less important uses. Like making the commons seem more polluted than it actually is to get some action taken.
If those files weren't there, the space would probably fill up, but now without any emergency relief valves.
It would be better if these files were a smaller fraction of space and had more oversight... but that's just a quota system. This is something halfway in between real quotas and full-on tragedy of the commons.
Similarly for file storage and "reserving" it by creating huge but useless files. If everyone was charged a fee per gigabyte per day, then people would be less likely to create those placeholder files. You probably have to be careful about how you measure, otherwise you'll get automated processes that delete the placeholder files at 11:59pm and create them at 12:01am.