we have 6 months of experience operating thousands of physical disks in datacenters now! it's about a couple hours a month of employee time in steady-state.
Don't get me wrong, I buy the actual numbers regarding hardware costs, but in addition to that presenting the rest as basically a one man show in terms of maintenance hours is the point where I'm very sceptical.
we also use cloudflare extensively for everything that isn't the core heap dataset, the convenience of buckets is totally worth it for most day-to-day usage.
the heap is really just the main pretraining corpus and nothing else.