Why is photo management so difficult with Apple

I'm about a 50:50 Windows/Apple User.

One thing that continually frustrates me is Apple's photo management.

If I had an Android phone I could connect it to a Windows Laptop and Copy over the images as a back up in a few simple steps. If my phone was full I could just delete images to free up space.

I just don't get the current Apple set up for photo management. This being from the company who invented the iPhone / iPad software that made things that were previously very complicated on Nokia / Windows much simpler.

The first thing is if you phone is full it is almost nigh on impossible to delete a photo to free up space to get the phone working again. It puts it in a holding area to be deleted later.

If you try and turn off iCloud if gives very strong warnings about losing data. Why can't I just turn it off and everything stays as is until I turn it back on again.

Getting photos off a phone to an iMac and subsequently backed up to an external hard drive is the most convoluted process. It's not obvious, it's hard to know what's it's doing at a particular point in time. It's very unclear where the photos are stored (the whole Apple filing system is nuts, very hard to find things in directories). Backing up those photos to external drives is then also not obvious and quite convoluted.

Having to dismount an external drive before removing it creates a very risky situation where the disk can easily be corrupted. Why isn't it just plug and play. Why doesn't it dismount automatically as the hard drive is removed. Windows seems to have no problems with this.

Is it Apple don't care about the user experience of trying to back up images. Is it to force users to pay for iCloud storage by making any other options too difficult for users to figure out.