Up until now, I haven't cared much one way or the other with regard to inscriptions - I know almost nothing about how they work. Not being able to sync a node in 10 years would be a good reason to start caring, though.

What is it about inscriptions that take so much time to sync. I think I know enough to know it's not purely due to the size of the data: the last 2 years combined account for less than 30% of the total blockchain. (roughly 15% for each of the last 2 years). So, what is it about processing inscriptions that turns 15% of the data into taking 50% of the total time to process?

PS. I'm not sure what terabytes of data you are referring to... all the sources I can find suggest the total blockchain size is still more like 620 GB. Perhaps this suggests why I'm misunderstanding something.