That's including the enterprise premium for software, hardware support, and licenses. Building this in-house using open source software (e.g. Ceph) on OEM hardware will be cheaper by an order of magnitude.

You of course need people to maintain it -- the $300k turnkey solution might be the better option depending on current staff.

136tb for $3k (used gen 2 epyc hardware and refurb <1 hour 16tb hdd's) they're zero risk after firmware validation and 1 full drive read and write.

Priced out by whom? What kind of object storage? Were you looking at the price of drives, or the price of a complete solution delivered by some company?