The cost of storage in this case is more or less irrelevant - traffic is what matters here. You’re also not getting any mentionable bulk discount on the servers for that matter.
The key is that you can engineer things in completely different way when you have trivial amounts of traffic hitting your systems - you can do things that will not scale in any way, shape or form.
Product launches are the vehicle for attaining promotions at Google, allegedly. Maintenance does not get similarly rewarded, nor does launching projects and having them live on to actually be successful.
When the launcher got promoted and moved on, they have to figure out whether to keep the thing around, and the answer is generally going to be no since few things can really compete with the infinite money glitch that is search ads.