The problem here is that a lot of the stuff stored on phones falls somewhere between "dies with me" private and "should pass on to my family" private. Or "should be recoverable if I lose my key" private.

Strong encryption makes it impossible to recover in the event of a lost key or pass on to family in the event of your death. So that's not necessarily a great default for, say, decades of family photos. It would be a huge tragedy if that was lost.

The good news is that Apple does provide tools to opt-in to stronger security, rather easily. For example, the Notes app was recently upgraded with note-level strong encryption. That might be a good solution for your most private notes, without endangering the survivability of your digital memories and assets.