I would imagine, as someone with no special insight into goings-on at Hivekit, that the answer is intended scale.

They mention 13.5k simultaneous connections. The US has 4.2 million tractors alone, just the US, just tractors. If they get 10% of those tractors on the network that's a 30x to their data storage needs. So multiply that across the entire planet, and all the use cases they hope to serve.

Investing time early on so that they can store 50x data-per-dollar is almost certainly time well spent.