It was obvious from the beginning that the privacy nonsense was a convenient excuse to cover for their poor (especially at the time) cloud offerings compared to competitors like Google.

I assumed they pivoted to focus on privacy, but clearly it was just a marketing department innovation rather than a core value (as their marketing department claimed).

In retrospect this makes sense to me. I don't like it, but I get it now. When Apple said "privacy" what they meant was "we don't like tracking cookies or hackers but everything else is fine".

Privacy means “you pay for the device so we don’t sell your attention to advertisers.” That’s it. There’s no protection against state level actors (Pegasus, CSAM scanning, etc.).

If your threat model includes being the target of someone who will plant child pornography on your phone, you are already fucked. And no, Apple isn’t suddenly going to scan Chinese iPhones for Winnie the Pooh memes. They don’t have to. China already has the 50 cent party to do that for them, on WeChat.

Basically everything everyone seems to think is just around the corner has already been possible for years.

Is there a consumer computing device that’s more secure than iPhone against state actors? A Chromebook, maybe?

There is no consumer grade device that is secure against state actors.