I totally agree with you. I understand the whole argument of "if we start unlocking / decrypting our own (Apple's) phones for the government that would be bad"

I totally agree with you. I understand the whole argument of "if we start unlocking / decrypting our own (Apple's) phones for the government that would be bad" and Apple / their defenders should stick with that, not peddle falsehoods because they feel that's not convincing enough. Trotting out bullshit secondary arguments to try to come up with excuses beyond that are not only unnecessary but are potentially damaging to the root case of protecting personal data from government interception, especially when inevitably others will come out of the woodwork to contradict those statements. We don't need to come out on the wrong side of this and have the general public distrust tech companies any more than they already do.