When downloading directly from iCloud.com that's true (and annoying), but you can also bulk download all of the originals via Photos.app (making sure to check "Download Originals to this Mac" rather than "Optimize Mac Storage").
As I understand it, AWS virtualization is a full Mac client, right? If that's the case, there's no technical limitation that would prevent this.
Unfortunately, that wouldn't work for my wife's situation. Her computer is one of those MacBooks with a 256GB drive, and only one USB-C port. So the amount of data stored in her iCloud photos would easily overload her drive, and if I hooked up an external drive, the computer would run out of power before the transfer completed.
I'm not interested in buying a hub for a one-off operation.
I tried afp:// and smb:// mounting Photos libraries on large drives on other machines on the LAN, then downloading the photos to those, but that turned out to be excruciatingly slow, and very unreliable.
> only one USB-C port [...] if I hooked up an external drive, the computer would run out of power before the transfer completed.
Absolutely crazy how we ended up accepting supposedly professional devices that work like this. Choose between having power or being able to use a external hard drive (unless you purchase accessories of course). Mean while, desktop computers are built to be customizable in every single way.
I think in the marketing material, Apple tends to call everything they do "for professionals", not just the line of hardware with "Pro" in its name.
And how is this the best solution in 2021?
macos-virtualbox: "Push-button installer of macOS Catalina, Mojave, and High Sierra guests in Virtualbox for Windows, Linux, and macOS" https://github.com/myspaghetti/macos-virtualbox
macOS-Simple-KVM: "Tools to set up a quick macOS VM in QEMU, accelerated by KVM." https://github.com/foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM
If cost is the issue, there are a lot of off-brand hubs. I bought one for $15 of Amazon. So far no issues.