Well, I think we’re from the same generation, and I wouldn’t be falling for that either.
But on one hand we (as a community) keep telling people they should go ahead and self host, “it’s easy, just follow instructions” and now we expect them not to only check the size of their backups, but also view the contents of a .tar.gz file, something they’ve probably never heard of, nor know how to do that. And even if they do, it’s hard to tell when the contents are sufficiently there. Most forums that have their uploads on S3 do have some local files as well. It’s not that black and white that either all files, or no files are there.
The problem with restoring a forum where the uploads are left on the (previous) S3 location is that it does work. Everything looks fine, until the uploads disappear a month later. And even if files are missing, doesn’t the restore process tell you that it’s normal that “you will see missing images” and everything will be fine eventually?