I wish they did abstract it away. But iCloud is the only widely used cloud storage service that doesn't have file versioning. So as an iCloud user you really do need a backup and they're telling you as much every step of the way.

To most Apple users, the most important version is the latest version.

My experience with Apple backup is, please turn every backup on so you’ll max out your iCloud storage. There’s no way to tell iOS or MacOS to backup to a self hosted target.