Photographers and camera operators. One of my students remarked that his dad saves his pictures in raw format, and that they've grown much bigger in recent years.

Which is strange. You would think the father at least was done growing.

Vertically, sure...

DJs and music producers. I have about 32TB of externally stored samples and have to curate them for my DAW laptop.

That sounds like a lot of samples. Even with 192kHz 32 bit stereo wav that's way over half a year of continuous audio.

With 96kHz 32 bit FLAC it would be around three years.

Reservoirs are not useful if you can only refill the cup a few times.

Also, a bookshelf is not a library.

phew howdy, you must be crate digging. Thats a lot of samples! Im impressed

Anything to do with geotiffs

video editing, multiple projects

Sure, but are you really doing all video editing on all projects on the go?

When it's your job job dealing with huge data it quickly becomes very time consuming and error prone to deal with multiple external storage devices. (edit: by error prone I mean human error eg where did I put this stuff?)

8k raw video is very large - even a single project will fill that up and need extra storage to add externally.

A couple 4k cameras filming at 60fps at, for example, tech conference and you can about fit a single days footage on those 24TB,

If you're on location filming a nature show, yes. It's less to upload.