I have iCloud+ on a family plan. Gives me Apple TV, Music, Fitness and 2TB of storage. I use it to back up all my photos (with a process to back them up to my local NAS as well as additional cloud storage - AWS Glacier)

I’m on a Mac all day and have an iPhone and iPad, so it works for me.

Some alternatives might be cheaper, but the integrations are too good to pass up.

I use iCloud for photos, shared albums and device backups. It just works, configure and forget. I am on a 200 Gb plan, for four devices.

Just use iCloud with the encryption enabled

iCloud is good, I use it to back up everything outside of my photos since that would exceed my 5gb limit

I use iCloud with family plan. I also get Apple Music, AppleTV+ and Arcade. I did have Buffalo NAS but found cloud easier and didn’t really trust that NAS. All important stuff (apart photos) I backup to local ssd. I probably should backup photos as well.