I’m guessing their real prerogative is to keep unlawful content from ever reaching their servers. You wouldn’t know that from reading their press releases though.
Why wouldn't they delete them directly, but rather send report to the government?
Why wouldn't they go even further and if image detected on the webpage that is problematic => It doesn't allow it to get to my filesystem either, so that I don't get into trouble if for some reason police decides to search my laptop.
All relevant questions. Answer is the only one: so that when police knocks on your door you were blissfully unaware.
Quite honestly this is all too sad. Again this argument about CP that everyone will buy, but which doesn't work in the wild. There are some bad people out there, but if these people are into buying or creating CP => they will rarely upload it into iCloud. Especially now, when everyone knows Apple is looking for it. So they will go even deeper into hiding, while everyone else will have to live with devices that are spying on them...