That is a real Apple centric take. Android can store and synchronize most settings in your google account and there are many ways to manage app installation easily (you can install from a second device in the first place).
And the file system is easily accessible and has many ways to sync/backup to anything, not just Apple proprietary cloud.

On top of that, iCloud backups are notoriously bad and bring along with them a lot of unnecessary cruft that result in weird bugs and slowdown even with a newer phone.
Many people like to start over when getting a new phone since it is an effective way to clean things up and start with what really matters without having to sort through everything.

Most of the important data (photos, docs, contacts, calendars) are already synchronized somewhere anyway and the "big" data (music, videos) is not worth paying to backup, especially in the streaming age.

As far as I am concerned, the iCloud backup "solution" is a gigantic marketing play on FUD and is unnecessary for most people. But they pay up because they are not sure what it does and to feel safe (like paying up for expensive insurance). Once I explain to a friend that pretty much all the data he cared about was already synced to iCloud and the phone backup was just a "restore state" function he stopped backing up the whole thing because it doesn't make sense considering how much they charge to storage.

In fact, the iCloud backup is stupid and extremely inefficient, it should be just a set a command to restore the state to what the phone was (the configuration files, plus data pulled from iCloud plus whatever local data that isn't synced to their cloud); but I'm pretty sure they don't do that because it is much easier this way (less engineering skill needed) and they don't have to care because it is their customers paying for this inefficiency.
In fact, they actually have a vested interest to make this backup as inefficiently large as possible to charge more money for cloud storage.

Since iOS isn't accessible at the file system level, third parties cannot offer a comparable competitive service. At best they have to use whatever APIs Apple allows which is why we see backup solutions mostly for photos and contacts/calendars and nothing else.

Backing up over wifi is terribly slow and backing up with a cable is still slow and I believe this is one of the reasons they have not updated the iPhone cable bandwidth since the start and why it is still reserved to the pro. Considering the vast majority of the Over-the-air iCloud backups happen because either people do not have a computer or because it is way too slow to back it up regularly (either with cable or wifi) it doesn't take a genius to figure out Apple is selling this "solution" as way to remove a friction they themselves created and doesn't necessarily exist in competing platforms.

In fact, since Apple started focusing on cloud and services, their hardware/software have become progressively much less enticing, because they definitely don't do cloud any better than Google or Microsoft at less competitive pricing and their cloud stuff mostly require their hardware wich makes no sense. If you pay to offload your computing needs, why would you pay more for the hardware?