How prevalent is that? Some nerds doing this is a drop in the ocean. Rather my bet would be on Youtube as the hungry beast that can't get enough storage. There's a loooooooot of videos that have single digit views yet need to be accessible at any time, instantly. Video is large. Doesn't youtube even keep the original file nowadays?
In my experience, this is super common. Lots of average computer users send video clips, uncompressed 48 megapixel photos from their cell phones, PowerPoint presentations with embedded videos and 48 megapixel images, pdfs, and on and on. At the company where I work now several people have a 1MB gif of the company logo that they put in their signature.
Combine that with Gmail telling users for years that they had plenty of space, so there was no need to ever delete anything, and people believed it. Now you have a decade of emails with giant attachments or embeds that may or may not ever get looked at, and that keeps growing.
Deduplication solves that problem. There is only one (or very few) instance(s) of that gif on Google servers. That's why encryption will not be available anytime soon. Storage requirement would explode.
If you're okay with Blink under the hood, take a look at Vivaldi. It's made by some of the same people who did the original Opera, and is very much in the same spirit - instead of the modern trend of bare-bones browser + third-party extensions, it comes with "batteries included".
When it was launched a year or two ago, Brave didn't integrate with the Chrome extension web store, but now it does (just like Vivaldi). Of course, also like Vivaldi, you may not need another adblocker since Brave has "shields" which are very easy to enable/disable (but it works fine if you install ublock origin, privacy badger, quick JS switcher, etc.)
Opera was sold to Chinese investment fund, they are scamming short term loans in Africa now.
Vivaldi was created by old Opera exec with same goals as old Opera. Their problem is not being scammy, neither is privacy. Their biggest problems are code quality - UI in javascript is sloow, closing tabs or fullscreening youtube video takes one full second. Then there is culture of secrecy - pretending open source by dumping uncompilable tar.bz2 code shreds from time to time and keeping bug tracker behind closed doors in order to not show how (not) many people work on it and what bugs they ignore for years.
I tried Vivaldi for a long time, but a couple of things drew me back to Firefox eventually. The biggest problem was that it kept signing me out of Google for some reason. I've seen threads about this elsewhere, so I'm not the only person facing it. Then, the containers feature in Firefox was very useful as I have multiple "identities" in different spaces, so I could isolate them in their own containers to prevent spillover.
