Oh, don't get me wrong, you will pay a price for disaggregated highly available storage, and you might need to evaluate whether you want to pay that price or not. But those are two very different worlds, and only one of them gives you elastic disk size, replication, scale-out throughput, and so on.

GP makes Ceph sounds worse than it is, when reality is that just shoving all your reads & writes over the network, writes multiple times because of replication, is gonna cost you no matter what tech you build that with.