alt Hacker NewsStorage is cheap and I'd rather have an article marked as poor, short, stub but with some reference than no article.
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Wikipedia isn't a database. There shouldn't be a Wikipedia page about every single grain of sand, and neither should there be one about every single person. If you aren't notable enough to have a bunch of journalists write articles about you, then what you are doing isn't impactful enough to warrant an encyclopedia entry.
The disambiguation page of "John Smith" already contains 287 people. You're looking for the John Smith who was a US Navy sailor and received the Medal of Honor in the second half of the 19th century? There's three of them with a page already, and they have to be distinguished by year of birth. No need to make that page hundreds of thousands of non-noteworthy people long, having to be distinguished by SSN.
Wikipedia has other concerns, such as maintaining a neutral pov (avoiding the perception of advertising/endorsement, and likewise avoiding being a platform for libel and the lawsuits that come with that).
I've agreed with occasional deletions. Without that mechanism you just get self-promotional content. That stuff still makes it, but I think it makes Wikipedia poorer to be a Forbes 500,000 Under 500,000 explicitly. It's probably worth it to run a separate deletopedia that preserves the content but I don't think Wikipedia should be exhaustive. It's pretty good at only containing sufficiently notable things. One could argue that more things should move to fandom-style wikis and I think perhaps the Pokemon are better on bulbapedia etc.
We don't have a neat interwiki search yet that makes federation work well, but in time perhaps something like that will develop.
The deleted articles aren't actually removed from the storage, they just get delisted. Articles get removed because there isn't enough reputable sources to create an article.
Wikipedia would rather you create a blog post or any other method of getting information on the internet than to host unverifiable information under their trusted brand name.
Storage isn't the expensive part of running a large store of information.
That still worsens the signal/noise ratio and that's the only thing that matters in the modern age
But Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a reference for all knowledge.
Thus, it draws the line at things and people that are notable.
Maybe you think it shouldn't be an encyclopedia, but should be some larger project that indexes every product UPC, every person born, and every website ever registered, but that's not what it is.
And the primary obstacle here isn't storage. It's quality. You need a sufficient number of eyeballs and editors per page to ensure that the crowdsourcing is actually passing a minimal quality bar. Millions of short, low-quality articles means millions of opportunity for spam, abuse, and other problems.