I do delete near-identical ones, otherwise... I do pretty much what you do. I have lots of photos I took to mostly to show someone in one email somewhere, etc.

I use SyncThing for a lot of stuff, if I have a small file of any kind that I really want to keep, it goes in a sync folder.

Until recently, device storage just kept growing, so I never needed to think about getting rid of anything, the folder just followed me on every device.

Now phones are unfortunately ditching microSD, which I hate, so available storage is actually smaller than before.