Wikipedia has done well for itself using donation runs and grassroots support, so if there are ways for instances to do similar the decentralized nature of this will work out ok.
Elsewhere the issue is many of these large services have grown to the size of effectively being a public good, but good luck maintaining a public good in a profit generating way as a private company seeking the next quarter’s growth.
Yea “battery life” is the intersection of energy consumption and energy storage. Focusing purely on the spec sheet (the size of the battery) makes a very incomplete (and frequently biased) comparison.