And you're genuinely wondering why they are imposing limits? Sure, the new limits are <40GB/student, but most students are probably only using like 1GB of storage anyway.

They write some essays, store some PDF's, share some Google Docs documents, use a music streaming service, and don't download YouTube videos.

It appears that this is exactly the behavior they want to prevent - people hoarding personal (and illegal) files on institutional/corporate accounts.

I don't think you can complain about this while using your school-supplied account for that much private data.

Seems acceptable for schools to start enforcing acceptable-use policies that exclude using these accounts for anything but schoolwork if it saves money and resources to spend on other things.

Before abundant cloud storage somebody with internship money had to buy their own NAS. Kids these days.

As a masters student,I am seriously considering doing that since I don't want to depend on streaming and cloud backups anymore.

Any pointers good sir/mam on how to have their own physical backups? Like NAS and others?

Synology NAS. Seagate Ironwolf hard drives are a good pairing. You can setup your NAS to backup to AWS Deep Glacier or GCP equivalent so you have redundancy still.

Synology is good out of the box. I have a custom-ish U-NAS case.

Note that RAID isn't a replacement for backups. Personally, I just use USB-connected drives, Time Machine backups (on a Mac), and Backblaze for a secondary cloud backup.

Download youtube videos just to re-upload them to the same company's storage array. This is hilarious.

yes, because google has a habit of removing content from youtube, even educational content. (they made a policy to remove infosec content last year which they deem dangerous)

moreover, some youtubers remove their stuff

Youtubes copyright enforcement can hit videos at random, parodies like DBZA have been lucky enough to reappear after a few months. Other channels discussing movies or really anything else that might contain a few seconds of copyrighted music in the background can suffer random bouts of silence. So there are good reasons someone might feel the need to keep a personal backup outside of youtube.

lol, so in other words, you're exactly the reason they're doing this.

Why did you think your university account was for "whatever random crap I want to put in it", and also as much data as I could ever want to use"?