Disclaimer: I wrote this article and made this website.
There was some talk of this issue in the recent fediverse inefficiencies thread. I’m hopeful that in the future we’ll have a decentralized solution for file hosting but for now I deeply believe that users should pay for their own file hosting.
Oh yeah, I totally agree with you that governments should at least host their own Mastodon instances. I thought it was weird when Twitter became the go to for communication from the US Government.