The problem is that it just doesn't taste as good as the stuff made from grapes. I've tasted wines made from many different fruits and they're frankly all just ... not great. Not terrible (well, the home made apple wine (please note: WINE, NOT CIDER) was terrible) but just not great either.
In my country it's cold enough for grapes to not really grow well and there are some tiny farms that make and sell fruit wine and they suffer from exactly what you describe - it's very expensive and not well refined.
If you go to one of these places and have a nice experience tasting then you may even come away thinking that it was surprisingly good, but then you take a bottle home and it just tastes like fruit juice compared to good grape based wines...
With wine making, you seal the bottle, add yeast and sugar and then add one of those circular tubes with water in it that lets co2 escape but does not let outside air in.
They do this in the Frankfurt region of Germany, where it’s called apfelwein. They drink it diluted, which helps. Different taste than the ciders from north west of france or the uk
But yeast is involved in any fermentation process. You could make both cider or wine without adding any external yeast, but then you have a high chance of getting the wrong bacteria and messing it up. So almost everyone uses commercial yeast to start.
AFAIR it exists in the winemaking too, but it's even rarer.
As for the apple wine it was made with yeast, sugar and then one of those curly tubes that don't let air in but do let CO2 out. I remember a large room of those big bottles bubbling away.
If you don't want it carbonated, you let fermentation do its thing, then bottle it. No special steps are required.
If you do want it carbonated, you let fermentation do its thing. Then you can either put it in a keg and force carb it, (put it under high pressure CO2 overnight) or you add a small, precise amount of sugar then immediately bottle it. The added sugar will then ferment in the bottles, but the CO2 won't escape, carbonating it.
I'm not an expert on cider/apple wine, my background is mostly beer and wine. I've made it a few times, usually carbonated, sometimes not. My understanding is that the terms are mostly interchangeable.