Complying with complex privacy laws is surprisingly orthogonal to making a product with good privacy.

Maybe it's more because the privacy is largely marketing and helps with continuously shutting out competitors under the guise of privacy?

If they really cared about privacy, they would end-to-end encrypt iCloud backups [1] by default and not just when ADP is enabled, which only a small subset of users do. In fact, many technical people I know don't even realize that iCloud backups are not end-to-end encrypted. At any rate, this large hole opens a lot of data (including iMesssage) open to Apple, law enforcement, etc.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

[1] And iCloud Drive, and photos, and notes, and voice memos, and wallet passes, and contacts, and reminders, and...