That’s fair. I’m probably not thinking it through. I can certainly see how this could quickly go downhill. I think we’ll see the reality of it with today’s school generations getting jobs in a few decades.

That’s like people being worse at riding horses today. We don’t need the skill because we have tools that replaced it and generally do a better job.

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DRM-free > Imaginary perpetual ownership > subscription > drink a verification can to start

AAA do not manufacture demand for storage, that’s frankly ridiculous.
This is a simple issue of optimization:
A: noone cares to optimise the size when performance is a much bigger issue.
B: games are still often optimised for HDDs on consoles (duplicated assets), then ported to PC with as little effort as possible

Absolutely nothing, plus 7zip can be faster with better compression.
Well, apparently it can do some recovery of corrupted .rar, but who uses that format anyway

That is not how this works. The system isn’t using all that, I can guarantee that. Even launching a terminal (or any app) as hidden will not make it and its usage appear in taskmgr - I once unknowingly managed to exhaust my 64GB by launching hundreds of terminal sessions withoutever killing them. Try something like sysinternals process manager to see what’s actually going on.