You're missing the point with the extreme numbers, why wouldn't people configure their nodes to have 125 outgoing connections and 8 incoming instead of 8 and 125 respectively.
Because it wouldn't benefit them, it would just waste their bandwidth and cause other participants to banlist them due to wasting their bandwidth.
It's just like upload/download using P2P file sharing software.
You misunderstand the Bitcoin protocol then. The protocol is almost completely symmetrical, inbound and outbound connections work the same. Most of the software doesn't even know which side a connection was initiated from.
To the small extent that they receive different service, nodes de-prefer connections coming into them because they may be attacker chosen, while they choose their own outbound connections. So your node would receive slightly less preference from its peers if it made mostly outbound instead of mostly inbound connections.
if using outgoing connections & NAT works as well as running a node as far as availability & performance, why would anyone spends money running a full node?
Someone accepting connections doesn't have *anything* to do with running a full node or not. People run full nodes because running a full node protects their interest by enforcing the rules of Bitcoin for them.
Users listen to provide a service to the network, so that the network can exist (which is good for their interests if they use Bitcoin) and it's relatively cheap to do so. They also directly get the potential for more reliable connectivity, because if they accept connections they can also be directly linked to other nodes which only make outbound connections.
Most of them are on hosting providers.
No, most full nodes are not on hosting providers, most *listening* nodes are because hosting providers are not behind NAT and Bitcoin has no nat hole punching by default currently.
If full nodes have an advantage (maybe higher availability during big market moves), then the privileged access flag is damning.
This doesn't make any sense. What access flag? Why would it be 'damning', and what does that have to do with full nodes at all? Anyone can run a full node.
It also means Bitcoin is very vulnerable to community backlash. If public will pressure AWS, Google Cloud and other hosting providers to kick bitcoin nodes off their services there will not be enough resources to support all those NAT nodes.
Bitcoin would run fine if kicked off AWS and GCS. There would be short term congestion for inbound ports which we've had before, long ago, where sometimes nodes would take a while to get connected after restarting while users adapted by increasing their maximum inbound connection count and punching holes through their NATs.
Most public nodes i can reach are hosted on such services.
Yes, because they're not NATTed. They're also popular with spies. Some people ban connections to/from AWS/GCS/DO/Linnode completely on their nodes.
some users choose to disable inbound connections
Do you think they run their nodes with only 10 peer connections or do they increase the outgoing connection limit?
They don't increase it (I'm sure someone somewhere has done so, but it's very rare... I have very seldom observed a mass connector behind NAT, when they want lots of connections they want inbounds too). There is no big improvement with increasing your number of outbound connections, it mostly just wastes your bandwidth.
As I explained above, that has absolutely nothing to any of the whitelisting settings, preferred nodes are random peers selected by the software, and not something users can configure. It doesn't apply to all requests but only some peers, it there because it protects nodes against a tarpitting dos attack where malicious peers offer it transactions but don't reply when they're requested. It also helps protect nodes privacy by making it less clear to peers if a node already had a transaction which they offered to it.
That particular code wasn't even added until 0.21, which was only release four and a half months ago.
Maybe people sell that whitelisting so whales can have guaranteed service
Can you add a list of preferred wallets too? I think that would be even more popular than preferred addresses
There isn't any whitelisting there the transaction download manager's preferences are its own, your fixation on conspiracy theories appears to be clouding your judgement.
As many people have pointed out here, there is generally no benefit to small differences in transaction relay speed for network participants. Continually making arguments that only make sense if there were one doesn't cause there to be one, it just makes you look a bit unhinged.