Is Google Photos THAT bad for privacy?

You essentially have three options. 1. Cough up money and subscribe to Ente. 2. Use Google Photos and trust that they’ll not use your data for training. 3. Self-host via Immich/Ente and be done with it. Beyond that, it’s not worth fretting over. You either trust google, or you don’t. Ente is expensive, but that’s the only “real” private and secure solution out there short of self-hosting stuff yourself; which has its own shortcomings and headaches.