Those that exchange money for Apple devices are under the very mistaken impression that they own them or have any reasonable expectation of privacy on them.
But once you do anything that Apple does not approve of, they'll cut you off, lock your phone and your data and throw you to the wolves.
Oh, and by the way, they have full access and will be watching and checking everything you do with your device.
There are different degrees of everything, and simply pushing for a new set of image hashes to be added to the database is a lot smaller in scope compared to pushing for a feature to be rolled out to all phones.
Anything particularly new in this system is the privacy-preserving part with safety vouchers and stuff; none of that would be relevant if Apple were to be strong-armed by a Govt to do scanning of whatever photos.
I get the fear of Govts demanding on-device scanning of private photos, however I fail to see how any of this CSAM stuff makes that scenario more or less likely. The same slippery slope applies already since everybody with an iPhone is executing arbitrary code from Apple all day, every day.
This is where Apple is crossing the line.
So yes, now that the technology exists and they have proven that it can be integrated with their system, the damage is kinda done. Of course, if Apple now has to publish a different version of their software for, say, the Afghanistan market than they do the surrounding areas, that's a big red flag to people in Afghanistan that Apple have done something shady, likely at the behest of the current Afghan rulers. If that spyware is distributed on every iphone globally, and it's merely picking up on geolocation or some kind of network indicator, there is no smoking gun - so the first time people will know that this has been tuned immorally is when people start disappearing.
That's why a lot of the battle should probably now be "Make this software illegal in your country", because then the countries distributing "custom" versions are likely to be infected with this spying capability.
The thing is, once there is a capability to search customer device without a warrant, why would you want to limit it only to CSAM? For example, this would be a great way to catch drug users, dealers (someone taking photo of using or their stash / stock), illegal weapon holders, tax evaders (someone posing with wads of cash while being poor on paper) and so on. Then you have countries with strong anti LGBT laws and they would certainly want to prosecute these groups. It's madness.
At the risk of sounding cynical, isn't the cat kind of out of the bag on this tech now? Even if they hypothetically rolled this feature back (they won't) all the parties who would love to see it implemented now know that it's possible and can strong-arm Apple or any other vendor into doing it.