Not that it helps you now, but i also keep all our family photos in the cloud (iCloud in my case), but at the same time i have a small ARM machine at home that keeps a mirror of the iCloud data.

That ARM machine also has the responsibility of making backups, local to a USB drive, as well as to another cloud. Not mirrors, but proper versioned backups (as in Restic, Borg, Arq, Duplicacy, Kopia, etc).

I also maintain a couple of USB drives with yearly updated mirrors of the entire photo library. The drives are stored at geographically different locations, and surface scanned, updated and rotated yearly.

And finally, as a "last ditch recovery", i maintain an archive of M-disc Blu-Ray discs that contain a complete copy of our family photo library. Every year i make an identical set of discs containing the past years photos, and these sets are stored alongside the USB drives.

I don't bother archiving documents as everything that is important is stored on government servers anyway, or exists in hardcopy. Also, if every step in my normal 3-2-1 backup scheme has failed and i need to recover from the archive, i probably have bigger issues than retrieving my budget for this years finances.

As a fellow small ARM machine owner, what's your strategy for getting the photos from iCloud? Is there a tool one shouldn't feel weird to give their iCloud credentials to?