Sometimes, for groups with only messages of truly ephemeral value. If nobody values much what's written there (memes, where and when to meet, good morning, etc) then everybody is happy to see pictures and videos disappear and storage recovered.
I was talking with a fellow Matrix server admin and comparing our on disk DB sizes, theirs was 430GB and mine is ~7.3GB, total media size of 14GB or so. They said the MatrixHQ room bloated the database by 1100GB.
however, on the client side, you don't cache all that stuff, only what you can see; you have to scroll up and wait for the server to fetch it and show it to you if you wanna see older stuff. You can use the search, too, and that's "relatively" quick, and will scroll back to the correct spot.
But in larger rooms with more media, clicking the result to get the context is hit-or-miss.
