The goalposts have been moved because the leading argument for the past few years has been "it's not actually encrypted because you or the person you're talking

The goalposts have been moved because the leading argument for the past few years has been "it's not actually encrypted because you or the person you're talking to could be using iCloud Backup". Now all you have to do is make sure you and the people you talk to have this simple option enabled in settings (with the only risk being that you lose all your data if you need Apple Support to give you access to your iCloud again after losing all backup codes and encryption keys). As for your actual argument, there are always tradeoffs when we implement "good" but not "perfect" encryption solutions. Here, your trust is indeed in Apple to not perform an evil maid attack, but for many of us, we trust that Apple doing this to a regular person (or journalist, or government official) would be absolutely devastating to their entire brand. Even if most people wouldn't care if Apple cooperated with the CIA to perform a coup in $x country via sending out targeted malware to the leader's phone, they still stand to lose hundreds of billions of, if not a trillion, dollars over the following decade in lost iOS product sales, due to them purposefully hacking their own product to steal user data.