> nobody will run minio on AWS other than hobby projects and small demos.

You realise not every company uses AWS for any/all its needs?

There are datacenters around the world owned by individual companies or co-located. And many companies still have servers on prem.

Compute and disks are getting more dense & liquid cooled, so less rack space is needed for same power.

And Minio and others can handle Petabytes+

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/servers-un...

Backblaze, Cloudflare R2 and other cheaper S3 compatible competitors also exist.