I've never grokkeed suffix trees, but isn't possible for them to be O(n) in space (n total length of all strings)? Is there just an unacceptable constant factor overhead? I can imagine the pointer overhead being painful.
Also explained by the creator of this: https://www.abahgat.com/project/suffix-tree/
> the human genome can be encoded as a 3GB string constructed out of an alphabet of four characters
> As of 2019, a suffix tree indexing the human genome using state of the art algorithms can easily occupy tens of gigabytes.