Sounds like they had a tragedy of the commons, too haha

Partly that, partly the opposite.

It's basically reserving part of the disk for very important things only, which scares off less important uses. Like making the commons seem more polluted than it actually is to get some action taken.

If those files weren't there, the space would probably fill up, but now without any emergency relief valves.

It would be better if these files were a smaller fraction of space and had more oversight... but that's just a quota system. This is something halfway in between real quotas and full-on tragedy of the commons.

is there a model to solve these ?

I am far from an expert on game theory, but it seems that the cause of the tragedy of the commons is that people can use the shared resource for free. If there was a price to be paid, and the price was dynamically adjusted depending on conditions, then the overuse could be avoided.

Similarly for file storage and "reserving" it by creating huge but useless files. If everyone was charged a fee per gigabyte per day, then people would be less likely to create those placeholder files. You probably have to be careful about how you measure, otherwise you'll get automated processes that delete the placeholder files at 11:59pm and create them at 12:01am.

I was wondering if not all of human society is game theory through time/space taxes and prices.

That is how economists view the world.

I was more on a sociological/existential plane but I take that information too. I wish I'd read this kind of economic books rather than supply/demand or finance