What is especially insane is people STILL praise Apple for championing "privacy" - after Snowden, after China, after Trump ... the well-engineered sunk-cost fallacy is just too potent to resist, I guess.

Magical end to end protection in Meta and Apple (chat) software to protect you from… whom exactly?

MAYBE non US governments? They probably have deals with all the big governments allowing them to spy on their own people at least.