It is a bit sad to see something as simple as "you can now take your photos and put them where you want" become a newsworthy article. This is yet another demonstration that Digital Feudalism is alive and well, and just like its ancestor, we need to get rid of it by empowering people to be their own self
There are options in the middle - e.g. in M365 Personal, camera uploads are deposited as plain old files in your OneDrive Pictures folder and the Win10 photos app is driven directly by that. I periodically take offline backups by copying my OneDrive to an external drive and sleep easy that I have all my stuff.
My account isn't much more than a networked drive, so this idea of adding 'transfer to another cloud' or whatever is still a regression.
While we're here, read the title: "Apple now lets you..."
Lets? Oh, thanks for giving permission, Apple. I don't think any of this would fly under the GDPR's data portability provisions.