If you have a free and open technology that is sufficiently user-friendly that grandma isn't going to lose all her photos, I'm all ears
As failure modes go, not great, but I'd say strictly less bad for the average user than losing photos you didn't plan to delete
Those corporations are part of the problem, not the solution.
Local, doesn't need encryption since there's no middle in E2E that you need protection against, and simple.
Grandma can setup ~/.zshrc `alias bak=cd ~/phonephotos && adb pull ...` to make it even simpler.