I agree with you. I use iTunes also. I do keep an encrypted archived backup of my devices, for that time that I will need it. It came in quite handy when troubleshooting a network problem with my phone company, where the phone company tech support person advised that the only way to fix their network issue was to log out of my iCloud and reset my phone. That didn’t fix their issue.
I still keep my iTunes music library on my NAS drive. I hope Apple will provide some sort of solution for people to backup and sync by computer and I hope they make it available to users who can still run the latest version of iTunes, since I can no longer upgrade to the latest OS X.