Why would you use an iPhone if you don't want to use iCloud? That is the entire point of buying into the Apple ecosystem.
does that seem rational?
also such a weird line of thought that buying a single apple product isn't enough to be able to use it properly, and that any criticism of apple is just "us plebs using it wrong and not paying them more money"
If you want cloud storage, Apple provides free iCloud storage that will keep everything synced across your devices. There is an upper limit to the free tier space, at which you can purchase additional storage or move to a cloud platform of your choice.
And Apple's marketing ain't great either. They push your photos to iCloud by default, which fills the free space instantly, then when you try to turn that off they give you a vague and threatening message that your photos will be lost.
Marketing by threats will make me to at best give money to the competition.
And then what? There's a dozen messages here that say "Icloud" and I guess that's the point, people use cloud and done care for details. But I do! I want to offload the files and put them on my NAS and on my backup off site drive and manage and organize them. Icloud is not a step in that direction (maybe it is if you have a Mac laptop but while point here is discussing iphone and iPad as their own devices.).