I have first hand view of traffic Home Assistant creates.. there is an upside down usage model.

Infrastructure (servers, bandwidth, etc) costs money.

For better or worse, most devices don't have local interfaces. Some matter devices exist in the past year or two, but not all data/functions are available via matter. Older devices likely won't ever be updated to support matter.

Also lump in the fact that HA is a locally run/focused application, it isn't super compatible with a cloud based API/data delivery system without some additional development from the OEM end.

Last I did the math for an internal system.. in 24 hours HA traffic was ~20% of total, for less than 1% of users. That's wild. Mostly because each instance is pinging the API directly every X or less minutes.

If an executive here heard that math, they'd likely ask to block it as well. Right or wrong that's how people react.