I imagine it’s selective negligence. I doubt making the off-boarding experience super is high on their priority list, so it becomes as good as a dark pattern.
Only ~15% are MacOS users worldwide according to this: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...
- Use a mac. - If you have your photos on your ios device you can connect it as a camera to windows or linux and copy the files off. - If you use google photos, onedrive, dropbox, synology or any other file storage app that can auto upload photos you can do it that way - you can install icloud for windows and use that to sync photos. Its in my experience super slow for large amounts of photos but works. - You can request zip downloads from icloud. - You can initiate a server to server transfer from icloud to google photos.