Customer wins because everything can be local and you can extract it all, google/apple also wins because they get convenience style lock-in effects while being able to say that it's not lock-in.
I wish there was a simple and cheap off the shelf home server that could do this for laypeople, and backup photos etc. without relying on Google or Apple, but it doesn't really exist. Synology and QNAP and such get close, but they're still pricey and their backup options are limited. I've had Synology, and the big problem there was that each upgrade erased my photo database and albums and invalidated all of the links I sent out. It's pointless to rely on these.
I have a large photo library. I had facial recognition setup on the photos as well, and categorized albums and such. I went through two DSM upgrades, and each of them erased all of this, and each subsequent version of the photo software became worse and had fewer features. No more.
