yes

would rather not go that path

I want to be able to use Nextcloud the same way you’d have iCloud, without any hiccups in background sync and all this mess we have right now…

Also they are in breach of GDPR too because they’re not allowing data portability, if you request an iCloud Photos dump, you’ll get scrambled & non-usable files which you cannot easily import in whichever media platform you want …