Does StrongBlock really have lots of nodes?

This is a question lots of people have asked and it seems to me as if they are completely similar to all the other node projects like Thor Financial, PowerNodes, COMB Financial, and all the others. What does that mean? They do not have thousands of nodes... How come?

Running an Ethereum nodes costs a lot of money. How come? You need a VPS with at least 600 GB of disk space (more is recommended). This costs at least 15 Euro per month with the cheapest of the cheap VPS providers out there, but normally it costs way more.

When StrongBlock first launched their Node as a Service product, we all believed that the nodes were running as separate nodes. But, then it became easier and easier to understand that they do not really have a stand-alone Ethereum node created for each and every Ethereum node paid for and created in the system.

At first, I believed the 15 Dollar (paid in Ethereum monthly) as a maintenance fee for the nodes was supposed to cover the cost of the VPS. But, right now we all know that this money is used to pay to StrongBlock directly and that is why they could also lower the fees recently, seeing that we are in a bear market. But, if these were real VPS ran nodes, they wouldn't be able to just cut the cost like that. And if these were real nodes, then they wouldn't be able to just put up 10 new nodes in 1 second after the fee has been paid with a RPC endpoint ready at once.

Instead, they might give you different RPC endpoints whenever you create a node, but these are all just forwarded to the one (or maybe one of the few) StrongBlock real nodes. In other words, there aren't really hundreds of thousands of nodes, there are only a few.

Does this make me bearish on StrongBlock? It would be much cooler with thousands of nodes and that was what was so brilliant with the ByoN nodes in the start (bring your own node), because it really strengthened the blockchains. Now it isn't strengthening the blockchains anymore.

But, is there really a need for StrongBlock when it operates like this? That is a question I still ask myself.