What real world improvement has owning your data made to you besides increasing the friction for a lot of things?

Self-hosting UnifiedPush / ntfy drops FCM / Google Play Services as a requirement, extending the usable life of my phone pretty dramatically; the better battery life I get is just a bonus. Apps drop from RAM less-frequently.

The series I'm watching doesn't drop from Netflix. Nor do I juggle which services have seasons 1-3, and 5, and have to play the subscribe'n'cancel dance to watch the full series.

I never deal with radio-edits or censored curse words in music. When I pull up an album, it will be the proper album, not the smeared or changed swear words. This exact issue is what pushed me off Google Play Music.

What real world improvement has been made by allowing your data to be mined?

Keeping my photos in Apple's cloud?

Peace of mind in case my house burns down, ha ha.

I use offsite backups for that very scenario - From nextcloud (private) to https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage.