From the old Text types to the current Varchar(max), from simple pictures to entire PDF files, we always end up with the need to store some kind of blob in our database.
The small ones, such as Text and Varchar(max), have evolved and hide some small tricks capable of hurting the performance of your database.
About the large ones, there are reasons to store them in the database, reasons to store them outside the database, but since many versions ago SQL Server created a solution to achieve the best of both worlds and not only solve the blob storage problem but bring new features we were not even expecting.