There’s always a risk that someone you’re sending a message to has been compromised but most of us are never at risk from that, as opposed to things like dragnet data collection or server breaches. E2EE is solving the problems it’s designed to solve, so it’s not a problem that things out of scope are more complicated.
Also, how many people actually care all that much about their message history? I know I do (and I have 1GB of SMS/MMS/RCS message history dating back to 2010 that I back up to GDrive nightly), but it seems to me that most people don't care about their message history that much?
These all have significant usability impacts; I think Apple still has the correct defaults.
Finally, my understanding is that recovery keys are escrowed in a HSM separate from cloud hosting, and releasing an escrowed key is an audited event. My concern is mostly about actors accessing my data or surveilling me without transparency, as that gives no chance for accountability.
That said, I suspect that there's more people out there who're going to lose their text history with their dead parent and be distraught over that, than who're going to be actively upset that the state can subpoena their messages.
The issue you describe is just not an attack vector that is in anyway relevant, if you can’t trust the other side, every hope is already lost.
I don’t worry (very much) that law enforcement will read my messages but I do worry that advertisers, insurance cartels, spam marketeers, bookmakers or price gougers will.