I've recently started building a few Blurb books. I haven't had one printed yet, but I'm working on curating a "best of" collection from my photos (e.g. Best of 2020, 2019, trip to XYZ, etc...) and carefully arranging them all. It does take time, but I'm looking forward to the result. But as you said, not cheap.

I also use Adobe Lightroom, not just for editing, but for storing photos. It's a great way for me to look at, organize, and even publish-to-web, from either my desktop, laptop, or mobile. As for it being a cloud solution, I'm more comfortable with handing my photos to Adobe's cloud than to Google's (or Facebook's!) Although it contains far far more photos than I plan to put in my Blurb books, it too is a "best of" sort of thing.

My "source of truth" is a local hard drive dedicated to photo storage. When I shoot, my camera is set to RAW+JPEG, and I save both copies. The thinking is: RAW has the most data, but do I know for sure that someone digging through these photos in 100 years will have proper Sony RAW Codec to view them? Probably, just JPEG is a nice fall-back.... I organize photos using the following file structure

  /{celestial_object}/{continent}/{country}/{state_or_province}/{city_or_locale}/YYYY.MM.DD__album_title 
  .. e.g. /earth/north_america/usa/california/los_angeles/2021.01.18__visiting_steve
  .. e.g. /moon/mare_tranquillitatis/2021.01.18__first_shoot_with_new_celestron_lens
  .. e.g. /jupiter/2021.01.18__galilean_moons

Once a year I plug in a second hard drive and use Macrium Reflect to mirror the image. Then unplug that second hard drive an put it somewhere "safe", which at the moment is a storage unit down the street.

I'm looking to get a NAS and set up RAID, but even then I'll still mirror the disk periodically and keep a copy in a safe place.

But I do encourage everyone to consider printing photo books.