You can, still, gain a lot of performance by doing less I/O.

There's definitely a "everyone uses it because everyone uses it" effect.

Feather might be a better fit for sime yse cases, but parquet has fantastic support and is still a pretty good choice for things that feather does.

Unless they're really focussed on eaking out every bit of read performance, people often opt for the well supported path instead.

What people have done in the face of cheaper storage is store more data.

Storage is cheap but bandwidth no.

Storage getting cheaper did not really reach the cloud providers and for self-hosting it has recently gotten even more expensive due to AI bs.