These protections aren't there to protect you from "Apple", but Apple staff.

So for example if someone at Apple has been compromised by a foreign state, they can't copy sensitive customer data just willy nilly. They'd have to jump through a lot of hoops that would be prohibitively difficult.

Google had issues like this in the past where some employees were sending data to the Chinese government. E.g.: information about dissidents, political opponents in Taiwan, etc...

This is one of the reasons Google encrypts even internal server-to-server traffic, because the threat is on the inside of the firewall!