While I agree with the sentiment (fuck Apple) and understand your basic concerns, many of these gripes are just discomfort based on lack of knowledge, or old ios, or particular to your situation.

• cables: most people have this issue in different ways with different devices anyway
• the tradeoff is security (not privacy) vs convenience; but in the end ‘no random APK’ is a huge convenience as someone who has to worry about security all the time
• you can mess with home screen layout now in ios, and just make sure you go to the right screen before installing a new app to conserve layout (or change settings)
• App store sucks as bad as Lotus Notes ever did, but even worse, how sleazy is it that all of the in-app costs are obfuscated deep in the app description–it’s so so so unethical from a retail design perspective
• unless you’re embedded in apple tech with multiple devices that need to sync core apps, there’s generally no requirement to sign into an apple account device-wide, which means an updated iphone is probably as private as a basic graphene install without much effort, and probably more secure
• if I didn’t have to use apple products, I would probably just run GrapheneOS, but with the full knowledge that it will take more effort and money to maintain where an iphone would just be easier to get a similar level of security