It's downright criminal that apple doesn't provide tools to backup and archive imessages. I have like 40gb of messages on my phone that I do not want to delete, but I don't need them on my phone.
one friend lost many of his baby pictures
another lost all text messages from his (deceased) parent
many family members just break a phone and move on.
it is heart-crushingly bad that apple doesn't allow easy access and export from their proprietary message database.
and no, I don't mean running sqlite3
Most of the time the complaint is that apple forces you to use icloud and back up everything.
They explicitly said what they don't want to do it.