Do you remember the forums going down twice last year?
That was my fault because I didn’t pay the hosting on DigitalOcean. Part of that was because the pictures (and other uploads) that @Marco mentioned were hosted in a separate droplet from the droplet that the Discourse software is sitting in. So when I thought I paid off the DigitalOcean bill, I forgot there was another bill that also had to be paid. And then when I would go in to settle the second droplet, I wouldn’t be able to access it without involving customer service because I was delinquent on the account.
tldr; we are rightsizing and simplifying the DigitalOcen account to avoid a persistent payment issue that I created a few years ago.