I’m never clear why the solution I have - a kind of hybrid of cloud and local - isn’t more popular.

I make use of google drive, apps and google photos and therefore suffer the knowledge that my stuff is probably being used to train AI (I’m personally comfortable with this) - but then I have local backups and sync for everything. InsycHQ gives me a locally (and NAS) backed up version of all my documents, I also backup all photos shot by my wife and I to my Synology, and then daily backup in 2x places that I own from there. My films and media are locally stored, and I buy a fair bit from BandCamp and I use Plex to serve but I also have Spotify for the convenience factor. …and so on

In other words - it’s a sort of multi-tiered approach. I’m not subject to the whims of cloud providers because if they change their pricing or terms radically I’ve still got all my stuff locally; ditto backups on infrastructure that I own and control in-house.

It’s always seemed to me like this is a pretty good setup, combining the utility of cloud with the reassurance of self hosting.

I think that's a great setup! I actually am still using Google Photos for this reason. I think of it as a kind of "offsite" backup. I take a lot of photos and videos though so I'm probably going to have to move to a more affordable approach like Backblaze. Thanks for your comment!