Richard Stallman's ideals have become a bit less crazy for me now...

Either you have the ability to control the software, or it controls you

I think coming to this realisation about Stallman's ideas (not the man, mind) is something that most rational computer users are bound to do. It happens at different times for different people, but I think people very rarely go back after that "Hang on a second ....??" moment.

I remember once he said "proprietary software subjugates people" and I just sort of blinked a bit. It seemed sort of over the top. And over time I started to understand that the way things end up working out, it is very true.

I always wonder why people usually choose to neglect privacy issues about Apple.

First, there was Apple scanning photos to check for child abuse[0] (that obviously got no attention on this site), then there was this one - Apple uploading hashes of all unsigned executables you run.

Do people really accept that company's "privacy" selling point?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21180019, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22008855

Is it even legal that Apple is retrieving this information?

Apple already has every iPhone user's photos, messages, browsing history, keychains etc.

Not sure how a list of installed apps is going to be worse than that.

Not if you choose to not sync them.

Yup, you can choose to not use iCloud backup and back up offline in an encrypted way (even over wifi) if you’d like.