I doubt the company is going anywhere so I don't see it as the end, but it invites a lot of frightening questions.
1. Do Android and Samsung already do this without letting anyone know? Or do they do it openly and Apple is just catching up? I honestly don't know.
2. In the U.S. it's "for the children", but what about people in China and other dictatorships where Apple feels compelled to "comply with local law"? Will Apple be turning over the results of their phone scans to those governments? Will anyone in China with a Winnie the Pooh photo, or a meme about the Uighur genocide on their phone be flagged and reported to the Chinese government?
3. How about in places like Russia where homosexuality is virtually criminalized? Will Apple be reporting who is sexting their same-sex partner to the Russian authorities? You might laugh, but the minute Apple rolls this out you better believe these dictatorships will start requiring Apple to use this technology to "comply with local law" if they want to remain in the market.
4. If I took a topless photo of a woman I dated 5 years ago, and it's still on the cloud, and it gets flagged, who looks at it? And if she's wrongly judged to be underaged by whoever on Apple's staff does the looking at photos, what recourse do I have when my phone is suddenly locked and the FBI is breaking down my door? Even if the charges are eventually dropped once the ex comes forward to prove she was an adult when the photo was taken, at this point the suspect has almost certainly lost their job and been shunned by the people in their life.
5. Will Apple pay damages for lost wages, pain and suffering, and attorney fees when a false positive leads to law enforcement action? Will Apple's Terms of Service include a provision where you agree not to sue them if they wrongly get you locked up?
6. How are they judging message content? Are they reading and judging fantasy sexts between adults? Are they only looking at messages that go to Apple customers who are under 18? How can I be sure that if I called my adult girlfriend a "bad little girl" in a joke text message, that the FBI won't be reading it the next day and deciding whether it's actionable?
7. Regarding reexamining tech options - not a bad idea. I've been in the Apple ecosystem so long, even to the point of enthusiastically buying Apple stock when I started investing, that I have no idea what's goin on with Samsung or Pixel phones or how a Windows start page even looks these days. It's past time I caught up on the outside world. But again, are those companies just doing the same thing too?