Free tiers do not make any money. So they have, what, 6 GiB of quota (however you want to imagine "quota" implemented) for thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, for 18 years. That adds up! It's getting more and more expensive to run datacenters (I can only assume they are using their own datacenters, and not renting space, as they've been live for about 18 years) via fuel costs, etc.
This is the inevitable culmination of literally everyone in techbro culture telling non-techincally-minded people "If you would like a blog, you should use Wordpress. They have a high usage limit and are free".
It turns out when everyone is using the free tier, the company has to tighten it's belt a bit? Who would have thought, under capitalism, that a company could lose money. Unimaginable. Woah.
Sorry, what do you mean by "forever" in this instance?
10 years? 20 years? 50 years? 100 years?
200 years?
500 years?
What if you start out being able to afford it but suddenly lose most of your funding overnight as result of bad press, and then have a court case on top of that?
What if millions more people are using the internet and blogging than ever before? What if file sizes suddenly inflate to the point that what was tens of thousands of images, is now only a hundred images?
The difference between 2002 and 2022, technology-wise, is extremely vast. 20 years is a very long time for a company providing a web service to have lasted.
This really doesn't hold up on any level, the more questions you ask about the conditions of "forever", and the more you bring reality into the whole thing, huh.
BtrFS can do it, and I bet that zfs can too.