It is like saying losing electricity forever should not be catastrophic event, people were living happily without it for 1000s of years.
It was a common trope in Holland when I was young. When people were asked what they'd bring if the house were on fire... The photos.
There are many people I know alive today (including myself) that don’t obsess over a day by day photo chronology of their children that you will probably never look at 90% of. Yet we all use electricity significantly every day.
Describe how 10,000 photos of your child is on par with access to electricity?
That’s some addict logic right there.
It is not. Electricity is just an example, probably a bad one. I would take it over photos any day.
But I am sure there are some modern conveniences that are really important to you while for others they are not as important. If you lose access to those conveniences, you will feel greatly emotional whether anger, sadness or some other emotion. And most people will sympathize with you and a few people will think that it is pathetic to obsess over whatever it is. And they will repeat same old cliche, "back in the days".
Just because it is not important to you, it does not mean it is "pathetic" if it is important to someone else.
I used to work in consumer-facing tech support shop where we mostly troubleshoot computers. I saw too many people crying in public because they lost all their data including photos of their kids. And only thing they cared about was for us to recover the photos. And if we recovered photos even if only a few, people would cry with joy. They brought us cakes, cookies, and other things as gifts. And if we failed, some people had almost mental breakdown.
Based on while probably small sample size, I do think feeling distress over loss of photos would be a normal reaction for majority of humans.
The risk of losing all your pictures in 30 years is probably like 50%.
The digital photo generations gonna have a void of childhood pictures when they get old.
An annual “print-a-thon” is a good way to capture those things that still matter after a year onto a more robust, albeit less flexible, medium.
I store them on ZFS shares at various sites and S3 glacier (not Amazon's own though).
It started as a gift to my girlfriend, but now every year we take our best pictures of the year and put it in a photobook. Cant be deleted that way. All the other photos are less important indeed.
I store about 20gig of important photos on my laptop (weddings, events, ... the really important stuff) and everything else is just dumped into google photos. We'll see how that works out in 20 years. But I feel at ease