I think of nostr as "free cloud storage, hosted by unreliable volunteers"

You seem to be saying "that's a dumb way to think of it, just think of it as an interoperable set of apis, and then you'll see it is useful"

I concede that it is also the latter and that that is good and useful

But what I mostly use it for is free cloud storage, and I have found it to be unreliable for that purpose, except when the data is small and ephemeral