exactly. on my relay we have a 14 day auto delete on the free tier, and you pay if you want to keep it on longer

That's what I do on pipe. I just roll off anything over 300k events, or with an overdue expiration tag or deletion request. That's plenty useful and that keeps it from exploding. https://pipe.imwald.eu/

Will has done this 3 times i think over the last 3 years, where he deleted everything and started over.

Personally, I think he should have started charging money for write access and sent out an invoice to every npub with "pay fee or be pruned"

Nostr people don't understand how to run and manage relays. They think Nostr's design is just "make the client do all the work he he " while relays get raped with spam and bots This problem was easily avoidable. I am glad that I designed my relay properly wss://relay.poster.place