Its an entertaining chickens-coming-home-to-roost situation for Apple's skeleton key service and I'm glad for it to be getting some much deserved scrutiny.
On the other hand, its another distraction in the same way that "you need to update to our new iOS yeaterday spiel" is a distraction from the fact that
LockDown mode > new update/patch that doesn't address all the main attack surface vulns
Yeah, tho, I would never recommend iMessage to anyone I cared about and thats only one of the many reasons I would never give it the time of day. Signal is superior in basically every way except its not as ubiquitous but its also not a default opt-out first-party thing like iMessage.