I suppose some of that comes down to the personal understanding of what “smart” is.

I guess you could call some person, that doesn’t understand a topic, but still manages to sound reasonable when talking about it, and might even convince people that they actually have a deep understanding of that topic, “smart”, in a kind of “smart imposter”.

I thought that MinIO is a Open-Source S3 implementation, which you can just install on your own system. S3 is a “protocol” here IIUC.

Is your complaint that they are using the S3 protocol, because it was invented and is controlled by AWS?

Or that some services might use it without MinIO, directly on AWS?