I am the family tech support and I certainly will not be rooting a device.

And I would almost certainly recommend Apple to my family for the “mainstream privacy”

I believe it depends on what exactly someone defines as mainstream, for me using degoogled AOSP it’s something normal idk if it’s mainstream but what exactly it’s mainstream depends on the POV don’t you believe? But in my humble POV definitely Apple it’s not exactly all rainbows about privacy and security, unless you don’t mind your “encrypted” stuff being seen by the CIA and the NSA of course.

There is nothing what you can buy out of the shelf and turn it on which respect your privacy and security at all wo a minimum effort and knowledge by the user, nor apple nor google are trustworthy at all, I mean if you will use their “encrypted” clouds to storage pics of your fat wife in them there is no problem but I wouldn’t recommend any of those big corps spyware out of the shelf to anyone involved into politics or really concerned about their privacy at all.