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

For personal use, I would definitely recommend iCloud for its simplicity and ease of use. Overall, I think cloud services like Dropbox, OneDrive, Azure, AWS S3, Google Drive are very convenient tools for storing data - whether for personal use or for a business.

Right now I use Google One (G-Drive, Photos, etc) on a 200 GB plan because I share this with a really good friend of mine who needs Google Drive storage, and with this I get a VPN on my phone as included with the plan. I also would use iCloud+ on a 50 GB plan merely for backup and the other really useful features such as Hide My Email and Private Relay. Also I would store pretty important data on my iCloud as I do have Advanced Data Protection on which essentially end to end encrypts my iCloud data which is really useful.

I’m definitely a fan of cloud services. I use iCloud for pictures and backups from my iPhones for easy access on my Mac and Mega Cloud for all the other stuff, like photos from my camera. My friends are always amazed how I just randomly pull up photos from like 10 years ago. I’m thinking about setting up my own NAS though, because I don’t really trust Mega in terms of privacy. It’s just that they’re the only provider that gives you 50 GB free space, but they reduced it to 20 GB for new users iirc.

I've started using iCloud fully since they implemented end-to-end encryption, other than that I wouldn't recommend keeping any (sensitive) data in the cloud if it's not E2EE