Apple should honestly just deprecate and remove it with the level of effort they put into Time Machine.

Look, face it, Time Machine is not really what Apple wants you to do. They want you to buy cloud storage and just store your documents (desktop and documents in iCloud Drive) there. Photos are in the photos app. Etc.

Maybe they should make a Time Machine cloud service to help them justify putting time into it just like iOS has cloud backups, which work incredibly smoothly. But it’s also possible macOS has too much baggage for that to work (then again, migration assistant also seems to work great.

Long story short, if you want this you probably should be working with a third party, something like tossing $5 a month at backblaze backup.

I’ve moved away from Mac and I’ve been having a great user experience with Pika backup, although it’s not quite analogous to Time Machine. Still, my Linux distribution is immutable, so backing up my home directory is pretty much the whole thing.