If I try to view this from a non-technical persons viewpoint, this shift has been transformative, really. Most folks don't care if their data has been transcoded a million times as long as its still useful and easily accessible. This has protected a ton of businesses and users from being at the mercy of their IT team.
Every service is "extremely high reliability" until it isn't. Sometimes, the causes of failure are even beyond technical ones. Look at the situation with Adobe Creative Cloud users in Venezuela-- the discs and wires are still fine, but customers are losing real value because of legal mandates. Your high availability platform can withstand a network cable cut, but can it withstand a court order?
If you're still thinking local first, it encourages awareness of multiple baskets. iCloud is down? You can still pull the photos off your camera's flash card, or your workstation's SSD, or the external spinning-rust hard disc you used for cold backups, or the third-party dedicated backups service you use...
Until they try to print their photos for the family album and discover that pictures taken by their high-end camera or an expensive iPhone were degraded by successive transcodings to the point they look like garbage in print, and at that point there's no way to fix it.
> This has protected a ton of businesses and users from being at the mercy of their IT team.
And put them at the mercy of third-party vendors. It's a trade-off, but having a local IT team has its benefits.
I don’t know. On the other hand, most older people like myself have had to deal with data loss from failed, obsolete or lost storage devices. There’s still no “one size fits all” very-long-term solutions for consumers.