Disclaimer: I wrote this article and made this website.
There was some talk of this issue in the recent fediverse inefficiencies thread. I’m hopeful that in the future we’ll have a decentralized solution for file hosting but for now I deeply believe that users should pay for their own file hosting.
It doesn’t even have to be to that extent, just being able to slow/stop that awful content from being uploaded by a bunch of malicious bots. Even if it’s not malicious content, you could still have people uploading spam that eats up the server space.