For 99% of people, a NAS is overkill. Plug-and-play USB drives get the job done at a fraction of the complexity.
People use so many cloud services and having it all private and self-hosted is absolutely amazing. It’s really not that hard to set up either, and there’s little to maintenance outside replacing a failed drive.
That started me down the path to owning all my own media.
It also didn’t help that iCloud Photos is a privacy nightmare.