The point of this article was trying to liberate bandwidth, and I was highlighting how even common answers like your Droplet are far from the value-end of what's available. I showed an 18x better price point than what you would have gone to, on transfer alone (the 8GB memory is also a colossal advantage vs 0.5/1gb on a droplet).

I think for a lot of people, a nuc with dual m.2 drives is probably a much more affordable & realistic entry point that would probably survive even your fairly demanding gameserving use cases. And cost less than half as much.

Overall I'm very interested in a future where we do have scale out edge caches, where we do just need modest resources to maintain wide-scale connectivity. Many personal services are not at this scale or not this architecturally complex, but being able to have efficient scalable personal systems would be an interesting ends to move towards. Matrix would be a good example of a service that would be nice to have good fan-out for.