I don’t think backups from HA are necessarily unreliable - they may be more finicky to use for restores because of the different environments and add-ons. Therefore, it is important to test the restore process for your environment.
My situation: RPi4 using SD card.
At the end of every month, and before I do any updates/upgrades (I usually wait until mid-month to do upgrades), I shutdown the RPi4 and remove the SD card (let’s call it “production”). I make a backup of the SD card using Win32DiskImager (backup). I insert the backup into the RPi4 and boot. I have just confirmed that I have a good backup AND I store the working “production” SD card in a safe place - I know I have two working copies (I actually have 4 because the saved “production” is actually rotated with 3 other saved “production” copies from previous months.
I can always drop back to the saved “production” SD card if I discover something strange or wrong.
I also use Add-on: Home Assistant Google Drive Backup so I have an off-side file I can use if needed (I only test this once or twice a year since my SD card rotation strategy works well).
If I was using an SSD I would create a disk image (not an HA backup) of that and store it in Google Drive and another cloud provider then I would restore it to see if it works.
This may be a little time consuming but It is better than struggling through trying to figure out why my back can’t be used to do a restore.
I think it is more convenient for me to backup, test, restore using the entire disk image than using the built-in HA backup method.