Why is Apple making it nearly impossible to move photos around without icloud??

I would like to remove my photos from my current, default 5G iCloud account. I have a lot of photos. I do not want to buy any kind of iCloud plan (especially since that's not exactly value for money with so many photos), and so cannot just turn off iCloud Library on my iPhone, because it doesn't have enough storage to re-download them all. What exactly is apple's good reason to prevent me selecting ALL my photos at once on the iCloud web app in order to download them to another device, which *does* have enough storage? Forcing me to select thousands of pics by hand is NOT going to entice me to buy any further kind of apple service in future.