> I’ve already pulled down my 2-300GB Google Photos archive

How? I've tried several times and can never complete the download. Wired ethernet, not wifi.

Takeout doesn't work in practice for bigger collections (archive creation routinely fails, timeouts while downloading, 50GB max size results in many splits)

I've used this 3rd party tool and it worked OK: https://github.com/gilesknap/gphotos-sync/