> All of the self-hosted solutions are also just way less smooth to use than the built-in integration iCloud or Google Drive gives with devices.

The built-in integrations (iCloud, Google Drive) are smooth right up until you’re locked out or forced into changes you can't control. Obviously.

There is a middle ground though: managed service providers (per-service). You don't have to self-host everything in your basement, and you don't have to hand your entire digital life to Google or Apple either.

Any particular examples you have in mind?

All of the options outside of the big ones (iCloud, Google Drive, OneDrive) seem vastly more fiddly and difficult to share with non-technical people. e.x. sharing a budget spreadsheet with my wife, shared photo albums, and so on.

If there are other options out there that work as well as iCloud or Google Drive, I'd love to learn about them.

The best I've been able to land on is making a local copy of the data under my absolute control, while using one of the top tier providers for my "live" copy.

Can you give an example? I am looking for a way out.

I kind of self hosted for decades on a virtual server until I couldn’t keep up with it. So much stuff broke something in the stack, bringing the server down. Often, I had to initiate a full lock down on everything before going up again, consuming a day’s effort or two.