all I need is enough storage to hold the photos I take until I get home and copy them to a hard disk

This is what I do. Routinely clean the phone every now and then with a backup to physical storage. I’ve personally never had problems with storage, and until recently was using a 64 GB phone. The SD card was always just for my music collection and it’s sad to lose that but not the end of the world (I didn’t listen to music on my phone that much anyway). I’ve never had to use cloud services because I don’t need access to every single photo or video I’ve taken at all times.