I know they have backed out of scanning photos on your phone but that used to be a thing they did if you did use iCloud. Plus I have several dozens of terabytes of photos and videos of my family so the storage iCloud offers (until yesterday) wouldn’t have been enough anyways. I just use backblaze and their unlimited storage feature along with historical roll back which gives me all the storage I need.

I do. Why would I entrust my data to external black box servers I don't control? Besides, iCloud is sync, not backup.

iCloud certainly includes a backup product

Apologies, I should have read the link. Most users conflate iCloud Photos with iCloud backup - the former being only a sync.

The most secret data is data that‘s not there. Why would I choose to trust a black box cloud with any of my data not knowing what’s going to happen to it (now or in the future) when I can just use my PC for that.

And local backups are faster, do store more data and don’t cost a monthly subscription.