> At pre-insane levels, $8k of storage would have been petabytes of non mirrored space.

Not quite. Before the insane prices I was able to get 4x 20TB for $1,200, so $300/20TB, so $8000/300 = 26.6, call it 27 drives, so 27x20 = 540TB, a little over half a petabyte, not "petabytes" (before mirror/raid/etc).

If you were buying that over time and keeping your price-per-harddrive about the same, you'd come up with much lower (since you would have been buying smaller drives in the past. Also smaller/older drives have to be rotated out due to age/wear/too-small so it's not all additive.

But you are correct, there is a difference between "data hoarders" and people that pirate and it's an important distinction (eww, that sounds a little AI-y, but I wrote it).