I avoided subscribing for years out of principle, just backed up my photos locally (which they make as painful as possible — afaik it’s not possible to just plug your phone into a Linux machine and grab all the new photos).

I finally caved a few months ago when I got tired of fighting with the awful backup storage UI that makes it difficult to determine why the backup is failing even though it’s smaller than 5GB.

Apple has every incentive to make that UI as bad as possible while still being functional.