Thanks, it's good to know this thing wasn't true. I wasn't aware of it at all.

Unfortunately I have seen other horror stories (dad takes a picture to send to the doctor, it uploads to iCloud/Google photos, account gets banned) to be wary of trusting any such large corp.

Partly tangential, but just yesterday there was a post of someone with a checzk password who got locked out of their iPhone. Now of course an iCloud backup might have actually helped them here, but the reliance on "It's Apple, it'll work" is a very common thing (understandably!), but unfortunately not true.