HDD prices have tripled over the past year. When your HDDs die, we’ll talk again. If you think getting paid for providing a service that comes with associated hardware costs (which you need to provide the service for a long time in order to get an ROI) is “too high” then just go door to door and ask people if you can run a node on their NAS. It’s easy money and this is financial advice.
Node count isn’t going up because the payouts are high. Wallet count went up by about 200, compared to last year. Node count went up by 5K. People are just running more and more nodes per wallet (ie same SNO, multiple nodes) trying to get compensated enough to make it worth their while.