that is correct, plex cloud is not the preferred solution for data hoarders using plex. plex cloud only supported amazon drive until jan 1st of this year[1] and all existing accounts were grandfathered in. that was a pretty short period of time but probably enough to create a problem. plex cloud is beside the point, though, because it isn't what people use for this. they used amazon cloud drive with fuse.
regarding fuse:
> you need a computer for it
well, not really, only to the extent that a VPS is a computer.
> I would say that's an outlier solution
an outlier solution for an outlier problem (can we agree to call that people storing 100+ TB of files?). except the problem was seemingly large enough that they had to get rid of it, so maybe it's not fair to call it an outlier. I don't think "first class" is a concern for people with such ridiculous amounts of data. plex cloud just makes things simpler, but running plex on a VPS takes two commands and there are some pretty detailed guides out there for people who don't know what ssh or digitalocean is. it's at a point now where there's even a platform for automating this stuff, complete with fancy dashboard etc.[2] needing to use things like fuse and encfs is hardly a barrier.
people talk about this stuff a lot more publicly than I would have thought, in places like /r/datahoarders, /r/plex, as well as the lowendbox, quickbox, and torrent tracker forums.
1. https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/203082447-Supporte...
2. https://quickbox.io/