If only there’s no carrier lock and photos can be backed up easily to personal storage.
Seem to be a common feature on most phones. Don’t like it? Bug your government to outlaw the use of the feature like “Canada,[5] Chile,[6] China, Israel,[7] and Singapore”.
iTunes backups my photos. No idea how to access them though - apart from restoring to a working phone.
You should be able to go to iCloud.com and log in. If you have the E2E encryption enabled, it will ask you to give iCloud the decryption key, so the webserver can serve you the decrypted files. (This ability can be turned off if you're really paranoid.)
possibly one can get a phone subsidized and locked until an extortion fee is paid, though, or get a phone from work that an employer didn't pay to have unlocked.
If you just go out and buy a phone outright you can generally use it anywhere.