Hi, original author here. The problem is not the lack of a backup. The problem is that the content deletion happens silently. So you won't know that you need to restore from your backup because you don't expect the content of your file to disappear. And over time your correct backups are deleted and the only ones left are those with the missing content.

Dropbox is mentioned in the article and it does not behave the way described here for iCloud. I can confirm Dropbox does indeed behave differently, as described in the article.

Is it even possible to locally backup everything to the same fidelity as the Cloud? Apple (for your protection, naturally) seemingly locks you out of much of your own data.