Cloud backups are great for keeping your photos long-term, but if you want those photos on your phone so you can show them to people or share them, you need to download them anyway.

I need storage because Honkai: Star Rail is 32gb and I like being able to have more than one game on my phone.

I know good network connectivity is not a privilege that everyone has, but on google photos I can scroll back all the way to 2007 when my digital photo collection started (I uploaded everything I had manually), and it's as if all those photos are local on my device.