"Think different."
How did we all manage all of our media BEFORE there was an iCloud? On our Macs. Mac can generally have upwards of endless storage, rent-free and fully within our control. Need even more space? Add another drive. New more space? Add another drive. Or a bigger drive. Etc. Use them ports and competitive third-party pricing for enormous storage for gigantic media libraries.
Then use the tools still there in that Mac to manage what lives on Mac vs. what lives on the mobile device. I strongly doubt just about anybody needs every single photo they've ever shot, every song they've accumulated, every video they own, etc. ALL with them at ALL times. I bet there is probably 80% of media on most people's devices that they've never viewed/played on that device... just hogging space.
Consider: what if you manage an extensive photo collection on your Mac in Photos but then make only select "best of" albums of photos you would really like to have with you at all times... then sync just those albums to your device? I do this in 2024. My iDevice has only 724 "best of" photos on it from a library of over 20K photos on Mac. Occasionally, another is worthy to join the "best of" album and that will become 725. And then maybe some other will make it 726. If I tried to give a solid 1-minute look at each of only 724 "best of" photos, that 724 minutes of time to see them all ONE time: 724/60 = 12 hours. 😱 So even with a piddly 724 photos, I pretty much rarely look at all of them in even a year's time. These are just quick access in case I bump into someone who wants updates on someone we know. I pull up a great pic of them instead of 87 most recent selfies of almost the exact same pose... and then another 76... and another 41, etc. One great pic can cover a lot of bases. Maybe 20 or 30 pics can be "best of" closer family/friends.
I also have a "smart album" that will include a fair number of most recently shot pics because those are the ones often shown right after traveling/vacations/etc... when we discuss what big adventure we most recently enjoyed. Then as that travel fades into the past, the next trip/vacation photos auto-sync to replace the oldest of those and the new adventure is what we talk about and may want to show a few pics as we tell the tales.
Net result: only a tiny percentage of 128GB is allocated to photos from a much larger library stored back at Mac.
Same with Music. I've accumulated a collection of about 16K songs that are basically my all-time favorites on Mac. I have more "playlists" of music than only the 2 or 3 photo "albums" to sync. But that amounts to about 4K total songs synched, again taking up relatively little space.
Same with videos. When I'm about the travel, I load up a Trip playlist in the TV app with about 10 videos I may want to watch on this trip, they sync and they take up a small amount of total space. Then on the next trip, watched ones fall out and I replace them with some other mix of about 10 for that trip.
Etc. All of this is basically how we did it before iCloud... and all of that still works and is about as easy as it was back then. I have about half of the storage of my iDevice "full" and half free and it has pretty much anything & everything I want to have with me... like our Fathers or Grandfathers putting about 6-12 favorite photo prints in their wallets (from maybe many books of printed photo albums back at home) and maybe a little box of cassette mix tapes under their car seats for their mobile media in their day. And that worked perfectly fine for them with their mobile photos being up to maybe a dozen and songs being up to maybe a few dozen.
And I use only the free iCloud space with only about 30% of that "full" at any given time... but never feeling like I'm missing out on something.
That shared though, if one feels the absolute need for access to everything at all times, another way to go vs. paying the ever-rising premium for Apple storage is buy a NAS like Synology, load it up and use their cloud storage on that NAS for access to everything in your own cloud. That's rent free and can be any size of cloud storage you want.
When I occasionally MAY need more than the usual pools of media on my iDevice, I put what I think I might need in my Synology NAS cloud space and can tap it if needed. I almost never need to do that but I can. Conceptually, I could load every photo/song/video into that space for on-the-go access to all of it but there is never enough time in any such time away from home where I can consumer all of it. So "best of" subsets tends to scratch all itches almost all of the time.
The way we used to do it might still be a good option for many of us. And owning ones own cloud can deliver the modern benefits of "everything being accessible" rent-free if we are among the presumably very rare person who must have everything available like that.
