I'm not mad about this because I use Google Photos, which has been doing the same thing for the last two years without people on the internet telling me to be mad about it.
Not sure what you mean. Google Photos is the default on every smartphone I've ever owned and this setting has been on by default as long as it has existed. You could just as easily say "Using Apple Photos was your own choice" and get shouted down.
The point is that outrage isn't automatic. Not everyone is going to be equally mad about a check box.
People aren't complaining that Apple Photos is installed by default. They're complaining that it's sending data up to Apple by default. You have to explicitly opt in to Google Photos backing up your photos to the cloud. That setting is not on by default.
Same. But honestly with all the "I pay extra for Apple because privacy" posts around here, I kind of expect better from them. Whereas everybody pretty much knows that if you dance with Google, they're going to be looking down your top...
Personally, the whole "send a vector embedding of part of a picture wrapped in encryption and proxies" seems like it probably is better, but maybe Google is doing all of thatz too.