Yeah, it's pretty unbelievable. Is the idea here that they're keeping these storages as general-purpose as possible to serve many different use cases and survive the test of time and change?

Or do they specialize these data centers for ONE specific feature? I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of the people designing the full integration of the system in the latter scenario, imagine your use-case changes... that's a whole new level of refactoring, especially once you go into special-purpose hardware.