Not the OP, but I found I had to do some digital spring cleaning once I realized 1TB of cloud/external storage wasn't enough for everything I was holding on to. I had useless data and archives going back to 2001, most of which I'd forgotten I even had. Long story short, after a few weeks of off-and-on cleaning, I got my mess down to around 200GB of data and archives, of which about 40GB is "must keep". That 40GB, mostly photos I don't want to lose, is backed up in iCloud (I have a 50GB plan) and is on my iPhone (128GB version) for quick access, as well as backed up on a flash drive and a SD card that I keep at work and my mom's house respectively. The rest lives on my spinning 3TB drive, which also houses about 1.5TB of Steam and GoG games so I don't have to re-download when I wipe and reinstall Windows on my gaming PC.

I could probably whittle that 200GB down to just over the 40GB "must keep" stuff, but I like having quick access to various operating system ISO and image files, Raspberry Pi images and backups, rips of my physical CDs, and various other project-related things. The bulk of what I deleted was forgotten detritus, left over crap from years of digital hoarding that served no purpose today. I'll probably purge again in a few years once all my hardware has changed and old OS and driver related stuff is once again obsolete.

If it’s photos that take up the space and you use photos.app it’s awful. I have no idea what the apple approved solution to this is.

I find that both iOS and the Mac handle large libraries badly. Mine is 110k approximately and it’s ugly. I had the library in a NAS and this was a great way of corrupting it.

Why would I want to carry around another device to dangle off the side, or worse, have to futz with tethering or spotty wi-fi or latency? I'd much rather have all my stuff (music in particular) consolidated and instantly on tap.