There's Immich https://immich.app/ and https://ente.io/ which are both E2E encrypted and not locked to any ecosystem (besides, e.g. Apple only has E2E encryption when you have Advanced Data Protection enabled, and even then not on shared albums). So those apps are strictly an improvement (and I use them). I also do not have Facebook/Instagram/whatever else people are using that don't care about their own or related people's privacy.

I'm neither using apples cloud, I just find the argument for not self-hosting a bit silly, since nobody is actually doing it.