Agreed, iCloud Photos is pretty nice. I almost gave in when they added the AI features and text recognition. Unfortunately, my library started having some stability issues. Was finally, hopefully, able to resolve those yesterday.
Still, one of the nice things about most of the photo hosting apps is they store photo metadata properly - in sidecar files. If they go tits up, and you maintained your metadata you really haven’t lost much. If the Photos DB gets corrupted, you’re going to lose data that would otherwise have been stored in those sidecar files. IMO this is a glaring omission on Apple’s part. I get that having all that info in a database makes larger libraries perform better, but por que no los dos?
Once I pick one, I’ll probably set up a regular donation. I should also probably drop some $$ towards the other projects since I’ll probably keep an eye on them.