Soooooo, it's "wide open to the FBI and any state agencies that get access to Apple's servers"-mode?

Yup. My naive impression of it is “we don’t trust our code to not back door your device, so we let you turn the highest risk portions of it off now. Mostly, gifs, because we’re don’t know how to safely parse a 35 year old standard.”

Lol, meanwhile they store Chinese data in CCP data centers. What a joke.