We live in a times that are good for developers: we not only have free access to powerful tools that other professionals need to pay big bucks but it goes even further: with open source we can co-shape these tools and in the extreme cases fork and create our own derivatives.
Why not take advantage of this and just avoid proprietary solutions as much as possible?
> The next thing for me is to "decloud" - meaning remove any and all online services that are not mission critical.
For me there are multiple parallel "side quests" and decloud is definitely one of them (I strive to minimize cloud and select solutions that can be self hosted and that are E2EE. Then I pay for hosting anyway but I always have an option of rolling my own. Example: etesync for calendars and contacts).
Other side quests: instead of Gnome use Sway, this requires manually picking wifi/Bluetooth connection managers (iwctl and bluetoothctl work well) and other tooling.
Yet another: convert my entire family to use Linux. Sadly this is harder since schools teach Windows but Gnome looks very similar to what they use.
These are just some examples. The good thing is that all of these are small steps that can be taken in any order to improve the situation in small increments.
These are often useful, so the better option is to host your own privacy-respecting versions of these tools.