To answer your question of 'how does one collect for a modern system'? Both my PS4 and my Xbox One have 4TB externals hooked up to them. This means that between the 500GB in the system & the external, I should have space for 80-90 games. Considering I don't own that many games for ANY machine I own, I think I'll be good for awhile. And if someday, that's not enough? I can just get another external.
Having said that, I hate that I HAVE to do that at all! I get that games play better from installs & so on, but I still feel like I should have a CHOICE in the matter. Plus, considering that the Switch can run amazing games like Breath of the Wild with less than half the gigs of some PS4 games, I feel like some developers might be taking the availability of cloud saves & big drives to get lazy with their file condensing. I watch the videos of the unused content that gets left on discs- I wonder how much space I'm being forced to devote to inaccessible beta code.
Yes, I am aware that big games are hard to program for, removing or condensing the code can cause bugs and errors, it's probably the money guys not allowing them the time to fix these things, etc... but if I'm going to have to put out a couple hundred bucks on additional storage, I think I can at least voice a concern on the matter! And Nintendo doesn't get a free pass here, either- they have to keep their gigs down because their system's drives are embarrassingly low. I mean, I've got more gigs in old convention photos than some Nintendo machines can hold!
tl;dr- all the companies are weird about memory, and just becuase there's reasons & workarounds doesn't make it any less annoying.