I've tried a lot of personal cloud options (ownCloud, a Resilio Sync mesh, CloundMounter + B2) and somehow ended up back on iCloud because of this.

My next experiment is just to use NFS over Nebula/Tailscale and see how much data I can just host off my NAS, but it's surprisingly been quite a journey for a simple problem.

You can't really switch away from iCloud without sacrificing it's deep integration.

The whole whole ecosystem is designed around it.

Don't get me wrong, Apple could've written their software with different upstream options, but they choose not to - hence going away from iCloud forces you to give up on a lot of features

I'm just pointing this out because if you've already attempted different options and went back to iCloud, then trying others isn't likely to be worthwhile, honestly.

You'd first have to accept that moving away from it means sacrificing features such as the photos sync (including delete etc).

That for me has been Dropbox. It's not even a shadow of what it used to be as a sleek, perfect sync tool, but the competition is so bad and getting worse every day (along with Dropbox) that "Dropbox + Cryptomator" is literally the best option I still have. Tresorit seemed to come close, but it's bug-ridden and really sluggish, and their support is painfully useless.

And as someone who has been in Apple's hardware ecosystem for more than a decade now (almost exclusively), I can't in my right mind bring myself to use any of its software/service products (and for good reasons, seeing it go bad to very bad to downright pathetic over the years) except for the OS because that's not really an option. Yes, I do have a small Cryptomator folder syncing to iCloud as well, but that's just because I wanted to have that as a backup sync, and it's a very tiny set of data that I anyway backup to elsewhere.

The bad of it? Yes, keeping everything under one roof really feels simple and easy.

The good? If Apple blocks my a/c today or nukes it, it will take a few hours to few days but I will get back everything single piece of data I have online on a new laptop or phone (Apple or Android or Windows or Linux) - everything! And it's a joy to use specific better/superior options for your software/service needs as per your specific choice!