It's just annoying that there's no middle ground between "hold my hand with a cloud service" and "I want to spend a little effort to not be 100% reliant on external services"
Google could decide to fold Nest service entirely (luckily there aren't signs of that) and at this point you'd have thousands of thousands of devices in a landfill. It's so irresponsible. Historically you could have a CCTV setup running for 10-20 years without huge issues.
>I suspect there are now modern, IP cameras that aren't cloud reliant
It's surprisingly limited and still a bit expensive. Foscam/Hikvision have been getting better, but it still feels a few years behind when it comes to firmware... and the notification and advanced "human detection" are obviously better with a cloud service.