Time Machine on macOS makes local backups painless. Since outright, utter, and complete catastrophe is (thankfully) still quite low compared to semi-conscious fat fingering files to destruction, or simply the loss of a hard drive, local backups via Time Machine are a life saver.
I've used it several times when my bacon got extra crispy. My wife uses it on her laptop. Absolutely painless.
Every now and again, Time Machine gets into a fit and wrecks its drive, or the Time Machine drive itself starts spitting up bits.
No matter, just wipe it (or replace it), and start again. This isn't archival storage. This is "oh no, I wrecked that file, let me recover it from yesterday".
Sticking $100 USB drive into the computer is just plain good practice.
That said, I also have her laptop copied over to my machine (via syncthing), and then the entirety of my machine is slurped in to the cloud via BackBlaze. They have about 2+TB of my data.
I do this mostly for the photos and other media, which I do not back up using Time Machine. BackBlaze is my $60(?)/year off site catastrophe solution. It's been really painless too (I have not ever used it for recovery, however, my recovery plan is to have them send me a hard drive with my files on it).
I always marveled that MS never came up with a solid Time Machine utility to make it painless for human beings to make at least some effort to protect themselves for carbon based or silicon based disaster at home.