The issue with iCloud is that before you even know it, you're paying $9.99/mo. Since 200gb is quite low, the next tier up is 2tb for $9.99, but then you're essentially locked in. I can't view the iCloud price tiers as anything other than predatory.
I don't know how I would even begin to fill the 50GB plan since I don't trust any cloud storage provider with pictures and videos.
Sounds like the issue is you.
Oh, c'mon. The entire services division exists to sell you things like this. And they are very good at it - 25% of Apple's total revenue
Frankly even if you know what you are doing apple doesn't make this easy. Image Capture is afaik the only real way to transfer photos to an external drive on iphone. And that app has not really seen any love since release, its buggy and frequently crashes with large transfers in my experience. It does weird things like if you select 13 photos to delete, it will delete them but not remove selection having the next 13 photo block pre selected for reasons that are unclear (Maybe the devs know how terrible the transfer experience is so they make it easy for you to throttle the job to like 250 photo chunks with this ui quirk). And what is worse, those icloud previews technically don't exist in the eyes of Image Capture, so those won't be transferred over let alone show up in the image previews.
It is not "entrapping", it's providing a service.
My senior-aged mom does have the skill, nor the desire, to figure out local image storage/backup, and I have no interest in running self-hosted solution (even for myself). Apple providing iCloud for backups is not "entrapping" her.
The complaint here is about the tier pricing model, not the service
If you use more storage why shouldn't you pay more? A 1000 sq. ft. (100 sq.m.) apartment costs more than 500. Is there a cloud storage provider that does not charge per usage? E.g.,
* https://www.dropbox.com/plans
There are certainly service for more technically minded folks that calculate more granularly:
* https://www.rsync.net/pricing.html
But a 'normie' may not appreciate a 'dynamic pricing' model, and may understand a fixed price system better.