I think that's a misrepresentation of the argument though.

MinIO by itself is fantastic software for sure, but running storage appliances is shades of difficult or expensive.

On the one hand you can buy a netapp filer and support plan which is basically as self-healing as the cloud is, netapp will send a human to go replace failed drives before you even know a fault is imminent.

On the other, that's expensive but running your own is complex if you're not setup to do it already.

MinIO is but one part of a data storage puzzle. Though a very important one.