Just watched a video on the new Photoshop 2019 CC. They really improved content aware fill. The new Frame tool looks terrific also.
The videos always look good - they wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't. I'm using CS6 and work on images both for OPR and other purposes and I honestly can't think of anything that would stop you doing excellent work if you used the earlier versions.
I know everyone has their favorite and least favorite features, but I'm not a fan of content aware fill. It's great if you just need something quick and dirty and almost good enough. If you need things to look seamless, it's never enough by itself when you're dealing with real world images - as opposed to the carefully selected images they use in marketing materials. Then you have to weigh the time it takes to clean it up versus the time it takes to do the work yourself. Once you get fast enough, it's less work to just use clone and heal. Looking everything over to check for flaws takes a lot of time.
The work the frame tool does can be done with earlier versions too. They're packaging features into new tools rather than changing what Photoshop can do. And no amount of tools will eliminate the need for the human using them :)
Were you thinking of upgrading to a subscription from a perpetual license? You certainly don't have to for restoring images.
I have the Cloud subscription and part of it is updates as they occur to Photoshop, Bridge and Lightroom. I never used content aware fill in the old version, it just never did a good job. This new version has a lot of control features that the previous versions did not have. One is that you have more control over what PS uses to select pixels to fill with.
It also gives you a preview of what your fill will look like so you can tweak your selection area until you get the results you want.