Yeah, I do this for a variety of reasons. If Apple doesn't have my backup, they can't give it to anyone and nobody can steal it from them. It's slightly inconvenient if I have to replace a phone while traveling, but honestly, that's never happened to me, and with a global pandemic, it's not an issue at the moment.

It would be much nicer if I can just backup my iPhone to my nas (which I use for my Mac's Time Machine target) which is always online and available over a vpn rather than have to pull out my mbp to do a backup.