I think if long term support is your thing, ownership doesn't really make sense for anything. Ownership is always going to come with a certain level of do it yourself.

I find it funny that we simultaneously work in places that understand that software requires constant maintenance and charge customers a recurring fee for it while being gobsmacked that we have to pay indefinitely for the same.

You go on-prem for the same reason you work does. Because the software licensing plus the amortized cost of hardware is less than the subscription.

Been a while since I’ve worked somewhere that actually did on-prem data storage.

I'm surprised since data storage, transfer, and compute are the things that you can absolutely beat every cloud provider on in terms of price. It was why we keep our storage in our own DC.

Gets harder when you take labor into account.

There is no reason. It's even hard to justify non iot drives when you consider having to buy drives for backups and maintain those backups. The cloud options just come out really good value.

I keep hard drives around for data I don't care about like games and movies but my personal data like photos is all in the cloud and it costs me next to nothing to store it.

This was an issue caused by a negligent company failing to keep their devices secure. For me the solution to this is not just to rely on another potentially-also-negligent company. In my opinion on-prem+off-prem, or multiple off-prem solutions are necessary for anything of actual value.