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).