When the industry only has 2 players...
People have been sold on how convenient it is for their devices to upload media to the cloud and how easy they've made it to "share" that content.
When the entire handheld platform industry is completely controlled by just 2 companies, no one needs to get "sold" on any particular feature before choosing to buy into that platform because there are virtually no other alternatives. Google is even worse when it comes to user privacy than Apple is. FAR worse.
In this case I agree with the OP: most people did NOT ask for Apple to be snooping around on their devices for data to upload to the Apple server farm without their permission. At the very least they should be PROMPTED for this action before proceeding.
Especially since Apple loves to crow about how they supposedly respect their user's privacy and their right to control their own data.
I have used handheld devices from a large variety of platforms over the years, and use and support both android and apple devices today.
Previously, I had all the iCloud functions disabled on my iPhone. But when I recently upgraded that device, Apple basically tricked me into enabling those functions during the device migration by presenting a dialog that implied that without accepting that login prompt, the App Store would not work. (Historically you could login to the App Store separately from a general iPhone/iCloud login, and this is still true, so that dialog presented was intentionally misleading in that regard)
So they started sucking all the data off that phone WITHOUT MY PERMISSION while I was doing that migration, and after frantically disabling all the cloud functions and selecting the option to delete whatever was "synced" I was still unable to disable iCloud entirely.
Then when I researched how to delete all the iCloud data Apple started failing to authenticate me to my account (a longstanding problem with them) and blocked me from doing so.
This stuff is absolutely "Big Brother-like" and there's no reason they don't give users more obvious choices to disable these functions if they wish to do so, other than Apple's commercial objectives of "capturing" your data and making it semantically more likely you'll feel "locked" to the platform as a result.