At $1 / month having 50GB end-to-end encrypted storage and hide-my-email is reasonable in case your choice is better privacy over controlling your own mail domain.

Photos sync to iCloud is terrible slow though compared to Google Photos - syncing 100GB take days and 500GB takes forever. At least it end-to-end encrypted with Avanced Data Protection. But yeah if you multi-TB photo archive buying large storage options of iCloud make no sense simply because it's impossible to use.

I'd better use self-hosted Immich.