People here keep harkening back to "but miners can handle that shit easily". It is entirely to avoid the setup where miners are the sole arbiters of the chain, that we require this. The entire point of bitcoin is to put power into the hands of people. Which means everyone needs to keep a copy of the blockchain instead of having a small number of entities with massive storage fighting against each other to decide which chain is valid.

The very fact that you guys are not recognising this means that you still don't understand the concept of decentralisation and want to settle with the altcoin route of making up the word as you go along and if it fits your narrative. If your entire chain was at the mercy of a few large mining corporations, you are dead in the water. The attack vector is easily compromised and you have no leg to stand on.

> A pruned observer node could run with just a few hundred dollars of hard drives even at Visa scale!

Each node would need to download 1.4 TB of data per day (500TB / 365) to keep up, and the UTXO set would presumably expand dramatically with a volume increase of that magnitude, making it impracticable to store even a pruned state on a consumer hard drive.