Here is the uncomfortable truth we would rather you heard from a friendly velociraptor than found out the hard way: magnetic tape is not forever. It genuinely decays. The signal fades, the binder that holds the magnetic layer to the tape can break down, and every single time you play a tape, the physical contact with the heads wears it a tiny bit more. A tape is a slowly setting clock, and for your home movies there is no reissue, no Blu-ray, no streaming backup. Once they are gone, they are gone.
Hollywood films you can always buy again in some other format, so those are not urgent. Your wedding, your kids as toddlers, your grandparents talking, that holiday nobody filmed twice: these exist on exactly one deteriorating tape and nowhere else. Start there, and start now. Not next year. The tape does not care about your good intentions, it just keeps aging.
Your transfer will not look better than the tape. A digital copy of an old, faded home movie is still an old, faded home movie. That is fine. A faded copy that survives beats a perfect tape that dies in a drawer. You are not chasing quality here, you are chasing permanence. Get the footage off the tape while there is still footage to get, and then, once it is safe, you can watch the original as often as you like without worrying every play is costing you a memory.