Ah ha, prepare to have your mind blown: q2view doesn't upload data anywhere.
All q2view is is a simple viewer that happens to be in a browser. Ain't no way Q2HQ is prepared to pay for bandwidth fees for the terabytes and terabytes of data that people look at in q2view.
From the docs (QIIME 2 View):
QIIME 2 View (or q2view for short) is an entirely client-side interface for viewing QIIME 2 artifacts and visualizations (.qza/.qzv files respectively). This means that you do not need to have a working QIIME 2 installation to inspect QIIME 2 results. It also means that the files you provide are not sent beyond your browser. In other words, this entire site functions without a server (which makes it very inexpensive to operate).
So with the above in mind, your statement here:
should be rephrased as
Yes, but it isn't in quite such a nice layout:
https://docs.qiime2.org/2020.8/tutorials/exporting/#exporting-versus-extracting
You can learn a bit more about the extracted contents here:
https://dev.qiime2.org/latest/storing-data/archive/
TLDR: no upload means no file-size penalty!
As part of our NCI award (QIIME 2 is now funded by the National Cancer Institute and lots of exciting new things are coming!), @ChrisKeefe is leading the development of a new provenance parser, so hopefully some exciting new changes will come in the next few months/quarters.
