> one big benefit of, say, iCloud photos is that I pay a monthly fee then I never have to think about it Just to offer up a real-world counter-example, I once

> one big benefit of, say, iCloud photos is that I pay a monthly fee then I never have to think about it Just to offer up a real-world counter-example, I once ran into a syncing issue with iCloud Photos where my family members stopped receiving any new photos that I posted to a shared album. I tried a few different things to get it to sync properly again, like logging out and back into icloud on my device, etc. It was basically impossible to debug because the whole syncing process is completely opaque to the user in Apple Photos. After about a month I was very nearly on the verge of ditching iCloud for photo sharing completely, and then one day it started working again just as mysteriously as it stopped. I agree with your broader point that iCloud generally requires less effort to set up and manage than rsync. But in this particular case I would have really loved to be running rsync, because I could have easily debugged it.