Dan Carlin has a political show called Common Sense which he releases once in a blue moon. Whenever it comes out it feels like finding $200 in an old jacket pocket.
It doesn’t store media forever that is routinely cleaned and configurable in the administration settings for the instance.
The content cache, which is database storage used for the text and meta-data of posts is more typically an issue over time because this requires commands to be run on the server to free up space, which many people do not do.
https://fedihost.co/blog/slug/managing-mastodon-storage
Perhaps you could write up the sort of guide you are talking about so I can see what you mean? I haven't found people respond well to hitting them with much more than this upfront, and they get anxious when you don't give them some specific recommendations to get started.
Freedom - https://freedom.to/
A very powerful cross platform website/app blocker with a lifetime membership option. Works well for blocking multiple fediverse domains.