You can transfer photos etc out of IOS on mint. For music and videos you can download VLC on IOS and then it has a magic feature where it opens a localhost website which you can visit on your PC and transfer everything across over Wifi.
I don't know why I never thought to try third party for music stuff, I will definitely check these out, thank you.
My music library is about 32GB now, hope those can deal with that.
It's technically no longer even there on macOS, thank God. It was becoming a sort of kitchen-sink dumping place, and I am glad that I can now manage my iPad through Finder (though I still wish I could just treat it like any other bulk-storage device, as I can on Windows, at least it's there). There are apps called "Music.app" and "TV.app", if I want to access my music and videos the Apple way, but I can and do just ignore them if I don't want to use them.
There are probably a multitude of other features that were in the old iTunes app that I never even noticed or have forgotten, but I think that a lot of users who used to be forced into using iTunes on macOS now can avoid both it and its replacements.
After fighting a long time to own my music, I have to admit I got tired of maintaining a library, and mostly listen on Spotify these days. But I never liked the library-based model anyway, and so (when still dipping into my own library, and especially when watching movies) prefer an app like VLC that accepts that I might occasionally just want to play a media file without making a library. (Same thing with Books: for some reason, Apple can accept that I might just occasionally want casually to open a PDF in Preview, but finds it impossible to believe I might want to do the same thing with an ePub. I still haven't found a good non-library-based ePub app for macOS; I wind up just using the one that comes with calibre.)
Thank you for the recommendation! Having to sign in is even less appealing to me than being forced to maintain a library, but it's good to have the option.