I’d gladly trade manual but bulletproof sync over paying a fee forever for essentially… storing files on drives.

We got to this stage of having to sync because Apple can’t stand putting more storage on client devices.

> We got to this stage of having to sync ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶A̶p̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶n̶’̶t̶ ̶s̶t̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶p̶u̶t̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶s̶t̶o̶r̶a̶g̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶c̶l̶i̶e̶n̶t̶ ̶d̶e̶v̶i̶c̶e̶s̶.

"because a company that sells you Cloud storage has very few incentives to give away more local storage, or compress/optimize the files generated by its camera app." might be more accurate

> We got to this stage of having to sync because Apple can’t stand putting more storage on client devices.

It's not why I use sync services. All my photos fit on my devices (more or less). But I want to have seamless access to my files from both of my devices. And most importantly the sync is my first line of backup, i.e. if my phone gets obliterated I don't loose a day or two of files and photos, I only loose a couple of minutes.

More device storage wouldn’t help. I couldn’t fit all of my pictures on any phone sold today.