While I mostly agree with you (and 100% on it distracting from the article), I think you’re not thinking about image rights.

If you’re a serious blogger with a good sized blog, a lawsuit or DMCA or otherwise is potentially a killer outcome of using an image you don’t 100% sure have the rights to. With AI, you can be 100% sure you can use the image however you want, without any repercussions. I’d imagine that’s huge in the considerations for a blogger.

You might look into NASs or at least NAS software depending on how much storage we’re talking about. Or there are S3-compatible self-hosted solutions that you can search for and do some research.

I might recommend, however, considering a service such as Backblaze if your website’s uptime is critical as a halfway between self hosted and SaaS. I like to self host stuff, but there’s some things such as data backups or password management that is better left to the cloud where you can get SLAs and confidence in your uptime (because it always seems that something goes wrong with your hosting on a Friday night when you’re heading out of town).