SSD
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I don’t know anything about your NUC but I have a custom PC. Every time I have thought I needed more storage I expand instead in migrate. I add the new partition and then add it to my existing virtual partition that is all the physical SSDs combined. I have done this twice. Once where I just added another M.2 SSD and once where I bought a PCI adapter that has an M.2 SSD mounted on it.

Upgrading Solo Validator to 4TB SSD

It's not hard for them to throw a few dozen TB of SSD and a few hundred GB of RAM on a SpaceX satellite and sell that to people while keeping 99% of what they are doing in their servers they are currently renting out.

It's relatively rare for someone to download early blocks from you. You're also not the only one serving them to others. Reading a few megs to upload them doesn't "kill" an HDD. It's what it's made for. Drives in data centers read and write 24/7 for decade plus. Picking an SSD for bitcoin node is purely a performance selection, to reduce your own wait agony if you can afford it. I'm going to bet a node running from SSD will wear out that drive faster than HDD. You'd want to replace either one in ten years of power on hours anyway.

Nodes don’t lose all their work when they reboot following power failures. Battery backups are common.
I don’t share all of your “third world” assumptions, but if I did then I’d argue that bandwidth would be the bottleneck not PC speed anyway.
But the thing is, used PCs are still very fast and one with even 16GB of RAM lets the user allocate, say, 10GB of dbcache which dramatically reduces HDD I/O….
We agree I’m sure that storage IO is the bottleneck we are talking about and that even an inexpensive SATA SSD would make a world of difference. Not sure what that does to the budget but the point is that’s not prohibitive.

In which case you bite the bullet and use a cheap used HDD instead of an SSD. Yes IBD will be slow but it will still finish eventually.

if you are serving your full node's blocks to peers, you better not store it on a HDD... the endless reads and writes will kill the drive eventually. you definitely want an SSD for a full node where you have near infinite reads, and the finite writes aren't a problem.

a 2TB HDD will probably be fine for the next decade and cheaper then SSD

What system? 6 months sounds like old Pentium II or unreliable internet. In that case, an SSD wouldn't make a massive difference.

It took me 6 months on my WD red drive, had to put the index on a SSD using symlinks to finish. (That’s not officially supported) A lot of people are having a similar experience…

Ja, habs verschlüsselt in der cloud, auf ner SSD und in einem Ordner in einer Feuerschutztasche.

No reason to use SSD I use magnetic hard drives for my full node in raid 0 cheaper and reliable

You speculate, but apparently never heard of the sneaker net?
Not all classified information exists on air-gapped networks or standalone machines.
Many of those classified machines are also on classified networks and people who use them have a network that can span the entire country in which those devices can communicate and access to many different flavors of cloud or local secure storage.
I used USB sticks, CD's/DVD's, portable SSD's to move updates to and from those secured networks until I built a classified software repostitory on an air gapped network. Stood up a linux repo.
Its not about sneaking the hardware in to move the things. I had authorization for those activities and paperwork to get that gear I carried with me through site security checkpoints.
USB devices are very hard to detect, and those security folks and metal type detectors you walk through don't usually pick them up or search your stuff that closely in a messenger bag with lots of other things.
I would also support the download and transfer of classified data (usually via portable drive) to give to Lockheed to take home on an airplace with them to their secure office for their needs.
I can do whatever I want to those devices when I am in possession of them.
Its referred to as the sneaker net, because its Shoes that people wear on their feet that power physical part of the data transfer process that bridges secure networks with insecure ones like the internet or to say move lots and lots of data cross country.

Your anger is misplaced. The insane prices of hard drives is a result of the AI boom. Hard drives have qaudrupled in price because of shortages due to AI. It wasn't nearly as expensive to set up a full node a few years ago, and prices will come down after supply catches up with demand.
Also, you don't have to use an SSD. You can always use an HDD which will be cheaper.
This is all out of bitcoin's hands. What would you have it do? It can't magically bring down hard drive prices on its own.

I went to impulse buy a mini pc and 2 TB SSD to run a full node only to find out that will run me well over $500 and 2 TB SSD will not be enough space in the next handful of years and in need to spend more money.
How does bitcoin expect to have world wide node operators when people in first world countries with full time employment (<1% global population) are not willing to fork over full node money and the prices are only continuing to expand for storage along with total storage needed also expanding?
I realize that pruned nodes are a thing but what happens when the only full nodes being run are corporate types that have gov and investor eyes on their backs?
Will bitcoin be able to maintain its white papers ethos of peer to peer e cash at the current rate? I would argue it already failed at the original claims. Maybe it will be successful as some other thing.
Please assist. Not trying to be mean but these topics affect people’s savings so I believe they should be straight to the point so common people can make educated decisions.

Bought a gaming SSD from SK Hynix for 80 a few years ago. Same one is now 360. Pretty insane and costs only going to go up.