As always when talking about security and privacy, you need to understand the threat model.
Apple protects users from some threats while also becoming itself the biggest threat to users. And this is exactly what Apple wants. This is how you use Stockholm syndrome to entrench a feudal system.
The relationship is not 3-way as Apple wants users to believe (Apple the defender, users the victim, third-parties the aggressor). The map of the territory is a lot more complex.
Framing relationships in this "triangle" is not new. As parent says, reality is a lot more complex, and this kind of frame-of-mind can be very detrimental:
In what case is the software not the biggest threat, though? Software is completely malleable. How many people update their systems by downloading the source diffs of all the libraries and apps, reviewing them line by line, and compiling locally? For the vast majority, the underlying software is considered a trusted system out of necessity.
The surprising thing to me is that there have been so few critical reviews on the system as it exists today - they are 99.9% "what if" scenarios.
To put it a different way, the possibility has always existed that your trust could turn out to suddenly be misplaced in a single, near-instantaneous policy change. So most of the discussions are actually about reevaluating whether they should consider Apple devices to be a trusted system or not based on this policy change, and trying to predict future policy changes based on it.
The reality is that Apple's spat with the FBI was possible because the US legal system allows it. Other countries can demand anything they want, and Apple has to negotiate with them or decide whether they have to leave that market. The scanning is a US-only feature to comply with US regulations.
If say China adopts a policy Apple does not want to abide by, their choice is exclusively to leave the Chinese market and to potentially adapt to no Chinese manufacturing or even Chinese suppliers. But this is no more or less true than last week.
The relationship is not 3-way as Apple wants users to believe (Apple the defender, users the victim, third-parties the aggressor). The map of the territory is a lot more complex.