I am semi-confident that with how anti-stealing feature works in iPhone, if apple servers are permanently down, few thousand phone owners a day will lose access

I am semi-confident that with how anti-stealing feature works in iPhone, if apple servers are permanently down, few thousand phone owners a day will lose access to their phone forever. Not only to data, that is the part of encryption deal. To the device itself. Otherwise, stealing would be very easy - just connect to wifi without access to apple servers and voila: phone is yours.