Ethereum smart contract size limit? Official docs and accepted SE answers seem to me to contradict eachother

Question

The first thing I read when Googling the question is this - https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/smart-contracts/ - says there is a 24KB limit.

But, on reading a couple answers, such as here - A smart contract's storage problem , further ERC ？ - apparently we can store a monumentally-more-than-that amount of data in a smart contract. I'm not necessarily suggesting the accepted answers on those questions are wrong, but I think either Ethereum need to clarify better what it says in their docs, or perhaps I've just misunderstood.

What exactly is the 24KB limit referring to?

Can I (successfully in real life and not 'theoretically') store GBs or even TBs in, for example, a mapping that I wrote in Solidity?

Is the 24KB limit referring only to the initial deployment / code? And the limit to the data, which is sent to the contract in transactions after the initial deployment, is much much more?

Answer 1

Is the 24KB limit referring only to the initial deployment / code? And the limit to the data, which is sent to the contract in transactions after the initial deployment, is much much more?

Yes, you got it right. There's no limit for a smart contracts storage, and yes, it's perfectly possible to store terabytes of data inside a smart contract, if you're ready to pay the price for it, of course.