There is no “perfect” type of drive. You have to balance capacity, performance and durability with price. How much storage do you need, and how much does it grow every year? What kind of work do you do on your laptop? Are you a gamer, programmer, video editor, or do anything else that’s extremely sensitive to disk performance?
Supply and demand.
SSD/NVMe prices have fallen dramatically and offer big performance, space and power efficiency benefits to most users. Many computer enclosures don’t even have bays to install 3.5" HDD’s anymore. If you’re building a PC for a user desktop or buying a laptop, most users will be more than satisfied with one or two NVMe sticks on the motherboard. There’s many more desktops and laptops than servers, so demand is higher and storage manufacturers have accommodated by shifting their production capacity to that product line.
So storage manufacturers have devoted more effort into maximizing materials and manufacturing efficiency/capacity to SSD/NVMe’s than HDD’s to accommodate consumer demand. HDD’s are now being considered more of a lower-volume niche/enterprise product, where capacity is more of a driver than price.
IMHO, there is no such thing as “the cloud.” All your doing is using other people’s computers. The history of the Internet is littered with the corpses of once “free” and low-cost services.
IMHO, self-hosting means running my own services, storing and processing my own data, on my own LAN and servers. It’s about minimizing my reliance on third-party service providers to avoid the vagaries and price shell games they play, while restricting access to my PII and staying in control of my data. I don’t do it because it’s easier or cheaper, because it’s usually not. I do it because I believe I’m better off for it.
Apparently, the downvoters don’t understand IPS.