As a matter of fact, with some external tools like MCEdit, it's not really as time consuming as it seems. A lot of large scale of Minecraft redstone contraptions are modular in nature, once you build and validate the basic idea, scaling up is just a matter of copy-pasting.
In my experience, the initial research/designing phase takes quite some hours (typically a good weekend), scaling up is must faster. In addition, most players who are into this typically have a number of creative worlds serve as libraries of past builds, so you'd almost never start from scratch.
That's like saying "Oh that cardboard cut out of Adolf Hitler? Yeah that's just for scale." Yes, indeed it is - but there's probably more to it than that. I'll go out on a limb and say due to the presence of My Little Pony that this person has a weird interpretation of what's considered appropriate.
On topic: This hard drive is incredibly impressive, and it's fascinating to see how the density changes between a 1K HDD and a 4k HDD.
> this person has a weird interpretation of what's considered appropriate.
Assuming that it's a single person? The use of "our" in the description (as well as the fact that they've got an online map in the last picture!) suggests that this is on a shared server.
