About “Security theater”: you can enable what’s called “Advanced Data Protection” so the encryption keys are only stored on-device for most types of data including photos, backups and also notes for example. Mail and calendar is one exception that comes to mind, but you could also always use a different mail and calendar service. This is a fairly recent feature, so you may have missed it. Sure, it’s not your fully self-hosted “cloud” on which you can audit every single line of code and whatnot, but it might actually be the best “compromise” of ease-of-use vs. privacy for many people outside the tech bubble we’re in in this community.
About “Proprietary App Store”: the store itself and many apps on there are proprietary, but there are a lot of open source apps on the App Store as well. The bigger problem is the fact that the App Store is the only (hassle-free) way to install apps to the iPhone and only recently the EU seems to change that with alternative storefronts now emerging, but Apple is limiting the use of them to the EU, so they’re essentially doing the bare minimum to comply with EU law.
About “Gaslighting their customers”: I’d like to see hard proof on that. I think what you’re talking about is the fact that messages sent to Android users using the default “Messages” app are sent as MMS, which is an ancient technology and as such only support tiny, low-quality images. Android doesn’t support iMessage and Apple seems to like to keep it that way as it’s apparently selling a lot of iPhones this way in the US (and sure, I agree that’s a bad thing). It does get better with the just-announced RCS support (a supposedly open protocol which Google added so many proprietary extensions to you can’t really call it open anymore) so pictures can be send in full quality to Android users using the Messages app. Also, you could always use a third-party messenger like Signal or WhatsApp and send full-quality pictures just fine.
I’m not saying there aren’t any concerns, but some of the information you provided is at least out of date.