The article mentioned storing data for a decades, which implies a backup use-case with infrequent access (of course, data only would be deposited in Glacier aft

The article mentioned storing data for a decades, which implies a backup use-case with infrequent access (of course, data only would be deposited in Glacier after the initial analysis is performed). If you expect to retrieve the data frequently, that's clearly not the right storage tier to use. S3 Infrequent Access tier is ~3x the cost, which still supports my point about the relative cost compared to total cost of sequencing. To address some of your other points: the 40TB limit per archive is not a limit on the amount of data your can store in Glacier. And assuming 100MBps throughput is implying you'd use a single node to analyze the data, which does not make sense at this scale.