Basically, I gave up trying to manage local backups by burning disks and copying to external hard drives.

I've gone to using Microsoft OneDrive as my primary file location. All my photos go on there, organized by year and event (with the date in the Event folder name so everything is sorted by date, "20191227 Hike and Potluck"). I take a lot of big photos, but few videos. 1 TB space (comes with an Office 365 subscription) will do me for a number of years before I get that used. I believe this system would solve Paul's organization problems.

My laptop gets all files as an offline copy, plus any other devices such as my phone get access. My phone becomes my portable photo album that way.

I do have a backup drive as well so that I don't have to download all files if my laptop drive fails. But that only gets updated a couple times per year.