I believe this article is asking for a centralized media server for his multiple Fediverse deployments.
Say I post an image here on Lemmy, then jump on to Mastodon to toot it out to whatever followers I have there. So that exact same image is stored twice.
I believe the ask is to build a system to store and deduplicate media posted across instances.
This is possibly a mismanagement problem.
“You must deliver this project in this timeframe, no matter what additional requests come through”
So workers see these requests as an impediment to their progress.
This doesn’t excuse the staffers behavior, but I imagine they were under some sort of pressure.