That seems shortsighted. People care because it is the ONLY viable alternative and Apple already has an extremely bad, profit above all behavior.
Apple ask a lot of money for the technology their devices feature and then goes on to milk their user for the usage of the device and most of the times, even longer because people get locked-in the system under the pretense of convenience, when the reality is that Apple makes it extremely difficult to switch.

For example, in the case of iMessage, it is the sole reason I even pay for the first level of iCloud storage: Apple will advertise the convenience and "quality" of their messaging solution, yet to effectively use it and sync it everywhere as it is supposed to, you will be REQUIRED to pay for the iCloud storage. Otherwise, it just won't work. To add insult to the injury, they provide ZERO management tools to manage/archive/backup/restore messages when the competition does that for free. You have 2 options, aggressively prune all your messages, losing valuable history or pay up.
Without that your messages are stuck on a single device, not backed up, not synced, stuck on a small display with almost no management capabilities (barely just search). If you don't pay, iMessage is basically a minimum viable improvement on SMS/MMS, it sucks. All the tools allowing you to do more rely on a Mac, are very often paid and/or require specific knowledge/skills; they make it an annoyance to extract the damn thing, on purpose. Anyone thinking otherwise is a fool. I'm fairly sure they stuck with low bandwidth USB on their phone to make it as painful as possible to sync your phone the "old" way so that they can upsell you to their could "solution", for a problem they completely created and meanwhile they advertise Thunderbolt for their computers even though since they dropped external GPU support the only thing that could meaningfully use the bandwidth is high-speed storage device, like you know, an iPhone...

The reason people even started using iMessage is because it was merged with SMS at a time when mobile data was still expensive and not everyone would have the possibility to get data on their phone. It was a convenience for Apple users, but then SMS lost relevance and they never opened up their proprietary solution while completely forbidding other developers to access the messaging capability of their phones. Their messaging solution didn't win on its own merit and now they refuse to compete fairly with others because they control the whole stack. It makes the case of Microsoft with Windows/Internet Explorer combo look like a minor mistake, because at least you could install an alternative that would be able to replicate all the functionality...
It is basically abusive monopolist behavior they complained about when they launched the iPhone, oh the irony.

If you don't understand the implications of overpaying for technology at the society level, that's really your problem. People making a lot of noise about this are doing you a favor, not the other way around. The reality is that while they make an obscene amount of profit, thanks in no small part to their uncompetitive behavior, they only make useful devices for about half the market. And this is only because we count a lot of older devices (the ones given to kids) who are largely obsolete and painful to use day to day. If you look objectively at the technology Apple isn't really competitive and many people end up getting an Apple device because they feel they have to, in no small part because of iMessage but also because of other implicit lock down. I can guarantee you that if Apple made it easier to switch to something else, many people would not keep using them long term; it is unreasonably expensive in the long run for what you get (especially consider how much of a pain their recent devices are to repair).
And people talk about Android because it is the only viable option left. Unless you want to be a Linux hacker there really isn't any other option for a smartphone OS; and the problem is that a smartphone is basically a requirement to function in society today. So, when you have a major pig eating everything in sight, you root for the cow, at least she only eats the grass.

Yes, people just want to use their phone, but they don't want to be left out of some social group because they didn't spend way too much money for a technology that is not superior in any way but will even have a higher usage cost for feature parity. If iPhones users would use WhatsApp or whatever other messaging application is suitable there would be no problem at all.

And for your information, teenagers use whatever their parents deem ok, good enough, cheap enough, secure enough, and so on... The reality is that a lot of parents give their older devices to their children because it is cheaper and easier that way and the only ones who are going to make a different choice are the technology geeks (the ones who are most likely to be interested in Android in the first place). Apple solutions for control are also a major reason I believe. Apple is a control freak; it is only normal that they enable control-freak behavior for their customers to completely police and put their kids on a leash. My father was a major control-freak asshole and last time I saw him and his new partner, they pointed out "screen time" and "find my" as a major reason to give an iPhone to her children. Apple is basically enabling dystopian like policing of children by their parents, and I think it's a massive societal issue but that's another argument altogether.