I am as frustrated as you. I am a long-time user of Macs - my first Mac was in 1985. Overall, I'm a fan, but the control thing has become over the top.
Even in Photos. There's the whole thing about moving pictures (so-called "backing up") to iCloud. Then you quickly run out of iCloud capacity and you either have to stop the iCloud thing or pay Apple for more capacity. A while after I stopped using iCloud, I discovered that many of the photos in my Photos library are much lower resolution than the original. I no longer have large format pictures of many of my photos, but small, poor excuses for the originals. I will never forgive Apple for this.
I also became so frustrated with the process of moving music and movies to my iOS devices that I bought and still use an app called Waltr 2. This makes it so easy to move files to iPhones and iPads. The company that created Waltr 2 is called Softorino, and they have a number of apps that make life in the Apple Universe easier.