My strategy is simple, I fill with my computer with crap until I decide I want a fresh start.
Then I back up these folders to a backup/year/month folder and never open them again.
But if I ever need that meme from 2013, maybe I'll find it.
At first I just moved everything into a folder named "old" that sat in the same place, and eventually probably wound up having 20 or 30 recursive folders all named "old".
It wasn't until after probably a decade of that I had the big-brain moment to actually bother labeling them by month+year and put them all at the same level in an explicit backup directory...
Ironically enough I have a folder on my desktop called "Sorted" that I just drag things into when I haven't used them in a while. Gotta love the search function, else I'd never find anything in the rare case that I do need it.
Comes in handy sometimes however, like having the installers for every major version, patch and RC of an indie game going back a decade, or old editions of a minecraft or skyrim mod that the author may have pulled offline in some hissy fit or another.
It's surprisingly easy to reliably remember that I would have put something in the "needed infrequently when I'm willing to spend a few minutes looking for" drawer.
I used to do it once a year, but I'm down to once every other year now. Backup folders get the machine name & year, and put on dropbox/drive/nas/other.
Entire machine is wiped, OS is installed, everything feels so fresh and sparkly. It's a bit like going to the dentist - not exactly fun, but you feel very clean for a bit afterwards.
Really helps also wipe out all the other accumulating cruft you just don't have the time or energy to go delete.
I'm not just wiping root and leaving home/mail/etc alone. I'm wiping and re-partitioning the local drive.
The partition layout on macOs is fairly complex - on those machines it would be comparable to "Erase all contents and settings" option, but also with a refresh of the immutable OS to the latest released revision (Not always the case on macOS, depending on your recovery drive configuration).
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That said, I don't buy Apple products for personal use - they're far too hostile to their users for me to give them money, and I was always a "function over form" kinda guy in the first place, which is not Apple's market. Apple is the chauffeured car of the computer world... Smooth, Expensive, Hands-Off. I don't always want to drive manual, but I'm not willing to give up the steering wheel... so windows, linux, and bsd for me. Although lately, less and less Windows.
Any info I need to retrieve can be found by searching for filenames or the various file metadata.
It's a time machine for your feelings.