Every pre-installed android device I have ever used or seen had a bunch of utter garbage I did not want, wanted to be rid of and yet could not simply uninstall like any regular app. How to reconcile this with what you're saying here? What am I not understanding?

You're seeing phones from vendors that have tacked their own stuff on top of the Android platform. Buy a Google phone and you'll find no cruft. There are still things you can't uninstall, but they're mostly essential to the functioning of the phone.

Google drive. Uninstall is "unistall all updates to this system app"

Google play movies and tv - likewise, essential?

Google play music

Google Hangouts

The list goes on...

And you're telling me the manufacturer decided I can't rid myself of these and google are as suprised as I am about that? Really? I mean you can make the same argument with Apple. They're happy for you to install/uninstall whatever but the manufacturer did it their way.

Pretty much all of those apps can be disabled which is equivalent to uninstalled for every practical purpose. Same as iOS as well.

(The difference is that APK is part of the RO partition which cannot be modified so that's the part that can't be cleaned up.)

Wat? I don't own an iPhone, but I can't even uninstall iTunes on my mac.

...iTunes is completely uninstallable on a Mac though?

The answer (as with most Mac-related things) is to disable System Integrity Protection. For some strange reason, most of the people who complain about the loss of their freedoms on macOS leave SIP enabled and I wonder why.