

How exactly does that prevent spam, vs just using other existing established verification methods like email validation? If the only goal is preventing spam, its overkill, and other web sites who also have to contend with spam don’t use it.
It’s trivial to create new accounts and emails to verify those accounts. It is not trivial to get a new phone number since virtual numbers are blocked by the verification process.
I used to use https://shucks.top/ a lot while looking for deals to fill up my NAS… the site doesn’t work now because of API things, but you can still see their historic “best price” and even the 8TB wd external drives barely got down to $120, so I’m not sure where you were seeing 12tb for $120 regularly. For brand new drives, like $12-13/tb was a good deal. $12/tb was generally low and rare enough I’d basically instabuy it.