I'm not familiar with the image quality issue. Doesn't the iPhone support the HEIF and in fact developed it?
Apple actively degrades messages sent using SMS to the minimum spec. It does not offer the option of internet delivery for SMS messages while delivering full quality media to Apple users over its iMessage software. It even goes so far as to display messages sent by non-Apple users in a deliberately unreadable white-on-green palette that end users cannot change. So even if you share a 40kb JPG, it's likely that Apple will apply lossy compression before that message is passed on, to or from an iOS user. I don't like SMS for other reasons but since I take photos that get shared at all, this is something that fills me with actual murderous rage. It's worse for younger people; GenZs consider not having blue bubbles as an indicator of poverty.
Apple made a big deal out of offering a file browsing experience about three years ago. This file browsing is still minimally functional and still does not represent the full extent of user files stored on the device. This has been one of my biggest complaints about iOS all along. This is particularly exacerbated from my experience trying to extract photos from an iOS device without involving an Apple Service. I found that I literally could not, even when the phone was connected by an OEM Lightning cable to a Mac. I just wasn't shown all the photos, nor photos in anything like their logical order, until the phone and Mac were signed into the same Apple account and backups to iCloud were turned on. Then, magically, photos were actually shown in date order.
The iOS keyboard is simply the worst one I've ever seen. All the punctuation is on a different screen. This is an insult to the concept of literacy. The earliest iteration of the iOS keyboard didn't even change the case of characters on screen when the shift key was pressed; they changed the color of the letters. IIRC it toggled between red and blue. Sit for a minute and think about why those two colors in particular might be a problem.
iOS propagates that web sites should be treated as "apps" but many iOS apps are functionally just single-purpose Safari sessions that are limited to a particular domain. iOS only allows one browser engine. Any third party browser on iOS is just Safari with different branding. You can't opt out of that.
The number of times I've been told some variation of "Well, I had to get an iphone because it's the only way my kids will let me see the grandbaby" speaks to the degree of cult mentality and Apple goes out of its way to differentiate cult members from people. Human beings whom I know full well understand to have used other services like Skype or Zoom to do the same things lose their minds and trip over themselves to have the Apple experience.
I am not joking. The people responsible for these decisions need to know what napalm tastes like.