First off, iCloud has worked great for me. Secondly, you're not made to use it at all... Apple makes it really easy to turn off in settings, and with particularly fine grained control. If you don't use it, things fall back gracefully to local storage. Thirdly, I've not seen a competitor that works better. Google isn't even trying (it's web only- the equivalent of iCloud.com without the numbers, pages and keynote apps for mobile and desktop.) That's not a slam on google, the web is what google does. It's just the closest competitor.

If iCloud was bad in comparison to something else, people would be using that other thing.

I'm just glad I can now finally get rid of Dropbox once and for all.