Windows on Arm has matured significantly in the past few years, and if your everyday work involves creating and editing Office documents and working with web-based services ... but if you're serious ...
Using an external drive requires more effort than backing up everything to the cloud. You need to wait for your files to transfer from your device to the drive, and then sort everything into folders.
In discussing where we went wrong, a panel of luminaries, including Vint Cerf and the Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle, sees three Cs: centralization, copyright, and competition.