I recently decided to trust Apple with my emails after witnessing a friend lose access to his free account due to some mistakes on his part. After he reached out to Apple's customer service, I was genuinely impressed by the helpful and knowledgeable support team. They escalated the issue efficiently through multiple levels, involving several phone calls over a short span of one or two days. What stood out the most was their unwavering dedication to resolving his issue, despite him only utilizing a free 5Gb account. Maybe hardware investments marks you as paying customer?

Knowing that if an issue arises there'll be a team of humans eager to help is quite reassuring.

[Another feature I value is Apple's "Hide My Email" (unique to paid accounts). While other services offer similar redirect/disposable email, Apple uses its @icloud.com domain, so the services you subscribe can't just ban the domain, they have to accept it].

My only issue with iCloud these days is the excessive amount of legitimate emails ending up in the spam folder, but I've noticed this problem persistently with Gmail as well.

Full disclosure: I am not the CEO of Apple, just a (mostly) satisfied customer.