It might be hard to understand, but iOS is a blackbox. Based on what they add and say, we still don't know what exactly is happening. All we have is trust. We can speculate that with "what ifs", but same "if" is applying already.
Once we take other big platforms on account, Apple is actually trying to note privacy. Other platforms just scan everything you put in cloud, but Apple tries to limit the information what they acquire, by scanning it on device. And based on their specification, they scan locally only what is going into the cloud. It took me a while to realize, but this is improvement for what has been happening in the industry for years already.
They did not scan everything. Only suspected ones, this expands scope to everyone by default. But this is still improvement. We might see followup as added E2EE services which was not possible before.
Once we take other big platforms on account, Apple is actually trying to note privacy. Other platforms just scan everything you put in cloud, but Apple tries to limit the information what they acquire, by scanning it on device. And based on their specification, they scan locally only what is going into the cloud. It took me a while to realize, but this is improvement for what has been happening in the industry for years already.