For me, it’s not so much that “Apple is still the lesser of two evils even after all this”, but that I feel this CSAM scanning furore is much ado over nothing. People are crying murder because there’s still a lot of confusion over how the feature supposedly works, there’s a lot of FUD being spread because it’s Apple, and then you have the people who love being contrarian about Apple because they think it makes them look smart if and when Apple screws up (never mind that betting against Apple has historically had a very poor track record).
I believe that Apple is still very much committed to privacy, and I see this CSAM scanning feature as an extension of that, in that it aims to achieve what other companies like Facebook are accomplishing in a far less invasive manner (not to mention of course that Facebook also scans your images for a lot more than simply weeding out child porn).
This whole “on device vs in the cloud” line is a false dichotomy and a red herring. For a company like Apple who controls everything, does it really matter where the process technically takes place when the intended outcome is the same?
People will come round in time.