I'm in the same boat, friend. Expelling Google from my life.

Apple Maps works for me. I appreciate that's not the case for everyone, but it's come a LONG way. I sincerely use Apple news (on iOS) and have been loving it, but appreciate it's not for everyone's use case.

Google photos.. yeah wow. There really isn't much like it. I've resigned to storing my photos myself on a private server and slowly making albums/things come together. But I have to NOT use google photos. It's too scary.

Gmail was easy

Youtube I use a fake gmail account that's not linked to me in the slightest and only use it on 1 iPad, else not logged in.

It's a quest. But I'll get there. Someone really ought to make a Google Photos competitor though, there's nothing that has the same level of polish right now.

Not a solution in this case - the problem is that companies like Cloudflare use these captchas to slow down your visit if you are using Tor or a VPN. In fact being logged in to google probably helps you bypass these checks

What is it in particular about GPhotos you find incomparable?

Do you have any alternatives? Something that works on most platforms and allows you to automatically backup photos as they are taken.

No, I don't, I was just curious -- I used to use Picasa and it's facial recognition was far superior to anything else I could find.

Flickr app has auto upload from Android at least, I'd guess Flickr as Google photos closest competitor?

Dropbox has had automatic photo backup for ages and is available on most platforms.