I'm going to downvote you because I don't know what you're talking about. My kids have 128GB phones and don't have any issues at all. They're also on our family plan with Google One for shared storage and we're still -- as a family of five where I personally have contributed about 100,000 photos (and some videos) over the past 15 years -- only at 1.2TB of consumed storage.

What are your kids doing that consumes so much local storage?

I see it was clear enough. We, my wife and I take many pictures and videos (4K 30fps) of our kids. My kids don’t use phones at their age. So our phone storage is always scary high.

They do cute things that I want to take a video or photo of and never delete from my phone

Here is a data point. We went on a one-week family vacation, my teens created a shared album which contains 3,000 photos and 100 videos.

Yep. I'm in my early 40's, recently self-hosted Immich, imported the archive of photos and videos my wife and I have created since 2000, and we're sitting at 216,000 photos, 5000 videos, 650gb+ of data. 2000-2011ish was point-and-shoot digital + DSLR, then 2012-2024 has been the output of TWO CELL PHONES.

We aren't photographers, we just goof around, and our almost-teenaged son doesn't factor into those numbers.

The sheer volume of data created is just .. it's nuts. And there's another 300gb of data generated from all the metadata, sidecar, smart search, face detection! Imagine all that plus much more that Apple Intelligence generates.

Long gone are the days of just putting JPGs into a folder!

But since it’s a shared album, most of that lives in the cloud and not locally cached.

If I was betting, most people likely pay for a cloud storage solution and don’t use the majority of their device storage.