It's soon 2024 and the iCloud email prefix is still not changeable

Imagine the following: someone has had an apple-id registered when Apple launched the service over a decade (or more?) ago. Imagine this someone is me and that it was working fine until one day, another person, probably a teenager in the US, believes that my email address is theirs. This person then registers again and again with all kinds of cloud services. Not all of them use email verification to confirm an account. And so it happens from time to time that I find out that this person has used my email address to buy something or sign-up for something, reserves an appointment at the garage for the car, registers at Netflix, Sony Playstation Network, Cylex, you name it. Again and again I become a subscriber to stuff I'm not interested in, get invoices for things I didn't order and more and more spam.

So what do I do? Right, I open a case with Apple Support asking them to change my iCloud prefix to remove the relevant entry. The idea is that I'll stop getting spam and finally get some peace of mind. But no way! It turns out that it is not possible to change the original iCloud prefix. It's also not possible to make an associated alias the main id and demote the former main alias, at least to remove it from iCloud email.

After an almost one hour long remote support session in which a very nice Apple support agent tried to help me and failed to achieve the goal, I was officially advised to delete my account and create a new one. Which of course means that my purchase history is lost. We're talking about a large library of music and movies that has been paid for over the years. Considering Apple is a multi-national, multi-billion enterprise, this is a very miserable situation. I'm not the first one having this problem and not the first one that was turned down. Apart from that, it also does not comply with data portability, a requirement of the GDPR.

It's bizarre and not acceptable that this limitation cannot be overcome.