I can relate to that, for sure. I also dislike the idea of having my personal property used to spy on me. The battery impact, the potentially degraded performance, and the overall creep factor. I dislike it all.
However, that was not what the parent stated. They said "Apple scan your photos.", to which I replied everyone else does as well. Because they do.
None of them do that on my device, that I paid with my money. No cloud service wastes my CPU cycles and batteries to report me to authorities.
It's apples to oranges, sorry for the pun. Please stop comparing what Google, MS and Dropbox do to what Apple planned to do.