Because from where I stand they do load everything into their cloud. They insist on having you pay for iCloud through obnoxious means. They have you go through their store for everything. They even have an ad platform.
What supposedly so good about it? Their track record seems awful to me.
It's still a compromise, sure, but it's a better compromise than what Google offers.
Plus small things. Apple's tracking protection for example is opt in instead of opt out on Android. Google's core business is ads, they won't push features that can negatively impact that. Apple also has an ad division but it's not their main focus, hardware is. They can implement better privacy without impacting their bottom line. Apple's refusal to unlock phones at the request of the FBI, etc.
It's not that Apple is the be all end all for privacy, but they are far ahead of Google and are by far the most convenient option if you are within the walled garden.
Or so they say. Has that actually been proven?
This is not unique to Apple, it's impossible to prove any system is free of a backdoor, including Linux distributions (see: the xz backdoor, or "Reflections on trusting trust"), unless you hand-crafted your whole smartphone from raw silicon.
The end-to-end encryption guarantees on this page seem pretty real to me and have little to do with marketing: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
It's very easy to completely disable iCloud. I've never used it and don't intend to, despite running a mac as my primary computer for ~12 years now.
My experience widely differs.
Apple will nag you all the time if you don’t have iCloud or just use the free tier and the free tier is very limited. You lose the only way to actually easily sync the phone when you disable it.
Most of the iPhone owners I know including me have caved and pay the additional tax every month.
As an example I think Androids have a single device ID which is given to all apps. But iOS has a per app device ID.
The marketing department exploded when Apple announced that change, it made user conversion tracking completely useless.
And of course there are guidelines that disallow most of the abuse scenarios I suspect people want to imagine: https://developer.android.com/identity/user-data-ids
