As for offline salvaging, do you realize how many phones have had bugs that resulted in boot problems in the last 10 years?
As for privacy, I would disable cloud sync and backups as well. But eventually came to the sad conclusion that I have a lot more going on in my life and I cannot sacrifice even more of my preciously little free time to self-manage all my data -- not to mention this would require a moderate investment in my own NAS / 10Gbps switch / 10Gbps router and end-to-end encrypted backups to 1-2 VPS-es.
I get where you are coming from, I do. But I had to make a choice between an actual life and paranoia. I settled for a "mostly ok" solution and a bit more of a personal life and free time.
If privacy and offline-first own personal data get commoditised, I'll be the first to switch away from cloud (and thus Apple).
The ability to do offline salvaging does not seem like such a big selling point to me.