To be fair, setting up a new iPhone (without restoring from backup) is a pretty long-winded process these days. You have to make about 50 decisions on various features, tap through numerous info screens, set up Face ID, Apple Pay, voice recognition, etc. etc. It feels like every team at Apple wants something in the onboarding flow.
actually you can skip most of these, but get reduced functionality in return. You can skip faceID/touchID, unlock code, appleID. You can’t skip terms, some customization options and, data collection and privacy settings.
In theory you can use iPhone and iPad without apple account - basically as dumb phone. But of course you won’t get AppStore access.
Keep in mind apple famously never fixes these bugs that let the phone be rooted via a 0click attack starting from imessage, which inexplicably runs with elevated privileges.
I mean they fix one when it gets known but keep the issue there, which is why there have been several of these.
