This is where I'm at after about a decade of being a self-described "data hoarder" and experiencing a drive failure a couple months ago and losing about 8tb of media that I realized I didn't care at all about.

Now I have a custom script that runs on the 1st of every month that A) detects if movies and full TV series have been marked as "watched" more than 7 days ago and/or B) if movies and full TV series have never been started and unmatched after more than a year and deletes titles that meet either requirement, while outputting a ledger on my desktop showing what titles have been deleted, the date, and for what reason. I ran a dry run of the script and saw that I was about to save 12tb of storage and realized how unimportant 99% of the stuff marked was to me. Really important stuff (my David Lynch titles, for example), are manually marked for exclusion.

Anyway, but of a blog post but I've realized this is the way for me. My Plex library is now less cluttered and full of only new things. My other users on the account can still request anything they want and my Usenet+*arr+fiber optic server can have almost anything ready for them in 10 minutes or less

Absolutely. But I do want to keep it, the fact that streaming services can just remove shows from their service is one if the reasons I dislike them.

Also a lot family members and friends use that to rewatch old shows or keep up with newer ones at different times, so not an option for me.

I do own the hardware. 5x8tb (down from 6) drives of media on my desktop (Phanteks Enthoo Pro is the best case ever made)

A single bluray movie will run around 50GB and full TV shows can easily be 100s of GBs.

Haha. That depends on a few factors. If you're going to the highest fidelity possible, you could fill 1tb up with about 20 UHD movies at ~50gb each.