I didn't mind that too much, because IPFS is strictly better than S3 in that regard. IPFS isn't meant to make it so that you don't need to host your own files, but rather that I can seamlessly host your files too.

In that regard, it's much more available than any HTTP server.

a file on S3 will simply blink out of existence too one day if you stop paying for one specific someone to "pin" it, so I don't think this point makes that much sense without further context?

I care about making things available to other people. My initial attraction to IPFS was that it looked like it could help me do that - but then I learned that just publishing a file to IPFS doesn't permanently solve that problem for me.

It solves caching/distribution, but it doesn't solve make-this-thing-available.

I've been using and paying for S3 for this purpose for 15+ years. I was hoping IPFS could offer a better alternative, but I don't think it does.

I might consider IPFS in the future if I need to distribute a prohibitively large file and my target audience are the kind of people who can access IPFS.

The Cloudflare gateway works pretty well for this honestly. You can send an HTTP request yourself to the Cloudflare gateway after pinning a file and Cloudflare will generally have it available.