Sorry - so the default, recommended settings try to cache absolutely everything from a single group, including cat gifs posted 5 years ago? I'm sorry, but I expected the default settings more... sane?
Well, I wanted to try hosting myself, since I love self hosting things and people keep repeating how amazing Matrix is - my experience (waiting 20 minutes to join a single group, or it simply failing) didn't convince me. It's possible that I'm the wrong here, in that case I'm happy to hear solutions.
Oh, so you never even had a matrix server hosted, but you're telling me I'm wrong. Hahaha!