Certainly, twitch pranksters and 4chan trolls have shown its practically frictionless to SWAT someone and get the cops to raid their house, much easier than any convoluted hacking exercise engineered by a hollywood script writer.
> there is no additional gain from going though all the hops
The only thing I could see would be getting the victim locked out of their iCloud etc accounts with little/no immediate recourse, as from what I have read the process seems to be to lock their accounts as the CP detection alert is sent to law enforcement.
> Also 0-day non click exploits are not something random scriptkiddies running around with dropping CP on random phones as they are way too valuable.
I agree, 0-days are the far high end and wouldn't be used for things like this especially by trolls, but I have to imagine there are methods in the lower-hanging fruit levels available to malcontents to sneak content like this onto unsuspecting users devices. Like, custom ringtone/emoji apps and download packs, random QR codes that lead to downloading a place's menu but also a suspect image, or other usual suspects.