Public and political pressure is definitely an issue - but it's still soft-pressure so applying more pressure in the other direction will be compelling to Apple.
The are speculations about this being Apple’s solution to government demands so that they can continue migrating to E2E.
They are trying a solution where the device reports you to the authorities so that Apple gets out of the business of knowing your data.
In fairness, in the "old way" it was impossible for two random people to communicate in real-time between continents without the ability of authorities to observe/break it.
Privacy and security is quite important, but let's not lose track of the fact that there are many tools authorities have lost in the past few decades. In WWII major powers weren't able to have the same security of military communications as an idiot can today. And that's relative to codebreaking technology.
If I had a good solution, I'd tell you.
Now your device is actually watching you and reporting you. Today only for child porn but there’s no technical reason of it not being extended to anything.
This is also true, to some degree. I believe all calls to the USSR were monitored, for instance. But the dragnet is thrown much further these days.
Child pornography, Terrorism? Solve it the old way.
I don’t know why citizens are obligated to make their jobs easier.
We survived the times when phone calls were not moderated, we survived the times when signal intelligence was not a thing.