AWS S3 is fast, cheap, and reliable — which is exactly why so many NFT projects quietly store metadata there while advertising decentralization. A single API key, billing dispute, or terms-of-service change can make an entire collection's images vanish overnight.
Censorship resistance matters for journalism, public records, and open-source releases. Permanence matters for NFT provenance and legal attestations. Builders who need neither should say so honestly rather than wrapping a centralized bucket in an ipfs:// prefix.
Running your own IPFS node sounds decentralized but shifts the burden to you: uptime, bandwidth, backup, and garbage collection. Most production apps combine content addressing with a pinning service or storage market — decentralization as a spectrum, not a binary switch.