This is an idea I’ve been toying with for a bit. There is a ton of media that includes unimportant information that doesn’t need to be stored pixel perfect. Storing large portions of the image data as text will save substantial amounts of storage, and as the reality of on-device image generation becoming commonplace sets in digital memories will become the main way people capture the world around them. I think this will inevitably be the next form of media capture (photography and video), not replacing other methods/ formats, but I could see things like phone cameras having saving images as digital memories set to default to save on storage.
You are missing the point of those photos though, they are memories, made to help you remember the exact moment you took a photo of.
You say it yourself, our memories ARE fuzzy, that is why this is dumb, it would mean getting gaslit by the very things we created to help us remember.
I am an IT guy, and I feel confident in saying that for the general consumer, storage is a solved problem, if you need more space, buy a new harddrive. Consumers in the vast majority of cases does not need instant access to all data, external drives are fine, if you want more protection, get a NAS with a decent raid setup, that is enough for most people, if you want even more protection, get two NAS, and set them to sync changes every night.