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If you repatriate content locally, do you need a NAS ?

I see the alternative to the cloud as being ~50, or more realistically ~100 for a usable external drive. No consumption when it's not used. Higher longevity than a NAS with the same drives. I don't think the alternative is a self-hosted cloud with requirements of being online, reachable by multiple devices, etc...

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It depends on your use case. If you just need storage as a backup for a single device, then there's no need for a NAS, but if you're backing up multiple devices and/or want to share data between devices, then a low-power NAS is a good option.

Yes, it's good to remember that use cases differ, and that not everyone has a few TB to share between multiple devices. Of all the people I know who still use cloud storage, none of them pay for it because it's not needed, and the free quota (15GB) is largely compatible with a sync-everywhere strategy where all files are always copied everywhere, thanks to Syncthing for example. Even for photos this is doable.

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