It featured geotagging and made it pretty easy to get really nicely organized albums for trips.
However I don’t really want my stuff on their servers nor am I fond of the subscription for trips I get to take maybe once a year these days.
Currently I use syncthing and some gallery apps (immich, photoprism), but due to network conditions (CG/NAT) accessing these outside my local network can be annoying at times. Ideally I could sync&transfer photos and have them cached on the device instead, which is what Journey accomplished for me.
I would look into options for solving your CG/NAT (DDNS…) problems, since it’s a first backup aswell. If your phone is stolen or lost, the captures from the last sync are already on your server.