If you operate even a medium-sized data center, it’s easy to have thousands of drives in operation. Allocating half a terabyte on each would not be a huge deal if they’re already decently sized. Besides, nothing in T&C actually denies using the space allocated, but not yet filled, for other purposes, as long as the space is available when it is needed by the node. And given the nodes operate behind a single IP, they are not going to be filled quickly.
The only problem is with T&C mentioning a separate IP per node, but this has been already covered on the forums.
Going away from artificial requirements made by T&C into real needs of the network. 2.31% of all nodes? Does not matter. What matters is amount of data actually stored. And this is limited by the fact it’s a single IP address. With the current operation what counts is number of unique IP /24 blocks that a given piece of hardware operates in, and these 500 nodes just don’t matter—except, probably, slightly increasing resources needed by satellites for accounting.
These 500 nodes dropping out of the network? Not a big deal, it’s just 500 × 42 GB = 21 TB of data. I host more, with likely worse uptime and latency parameters, simply because I’m operating with just a residential connection. I’ve likely caused more repair traffic with my single Microserver gen7 setup, than these 500 nodes. You will just not see this in official stats because it’s a low number of nodes. So you won’t cry about that.
There’s one more factor that might, or might not be at play here. Random people like you and me join the network with expectaction that we will follow the regular T&C. But large operators may just as well negotiate different setups. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Storj Inc. had some special arrangements, for example to maintain stable supply of nodes in presence of regular node churn. With the right type of contracts even regular node operators would benefit from presence of these operators. I recall someone from Storj Inc. stating here on the forum that they were approached by some companies already.