Is going with sapphire worth it?

Depends how careful you are with your watch. This is my 3rd Fenix model with sapphire and 2-3 times during every models lifetime I hit something hard that I think "oh crap its gone" then look at it and its fine. Of course that's not a scientific comparison and I have no idea if the other glass would have survived too.

And yes its a bit more reflective and you might have to change the angle to read it more often compared to the non sapphire versions.

• I mainly use my watch as a pool swimming partner, so the body is quite scuffed. Is there any backlight issues like with fenix 6?

What was the F6 backlight issue? Blue color instead of black? I made a thread with a vote on it, most were black.

forums.garmin.com/.../blue-or-black-backlight

I have a friend who broke a fenix 5S non-sapphire by whacking her arm on the pool deck during a swim workout. She subsequently upgraded to sapphire and swears never to go back. 

I have had a fenix 5X and 6X sapphire both take a hard whack on a rock in a tumble trail running and while the bezels were slightly marked, the glass was perfect and the watches never stopped functioning. 

I have friends who had glass fenix 3, 5, and 6. They all had a lot of scratches after a year but with the one exception smashed on the pool deck, all of the watches work fine. I personally choose sapphire. Scratched glass would really bother me. The concerns about reflectivity and light transmission seem overwrought to me. The differences are subtle outdoors in real life. I wouldn’t have noticed the differences without these side by side forum posts. 

You also get double the storage (32GB vs 16GB) and mult-band gps.

For me, no. Display legibility is worse with sapphire and it is significantly more expensive in my country compared to standard version. Gorilla glass proved even for long term users more than enough regarding durability.

brian.reiter said:

The concerns about reflectivity and light transmission seem overwrought to me. The differences are subtle outdoors in real life. I wouldn’t have noticed the differences without these side by side forum posts. 

Agreed