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They side they roll out of, evidently

In terms of storyline, it doesn’t really matter too much.

I still think you should play through the first one. If you need something that feels less 1998, Black Mesa is a remake of the original Half Life and it is very fun.

Third party apps don’t have the ability to back up in the background all the time the way the native Photos / iCloud experience does. They need to be periodically opened to have temporary background access.

Launching the third party camera app cannot be done from the lockscreen.

What you’re not understanding is the entire point of folks’ complaints. With arbitrary restrictions put in place by Apple, there cannot be full parity in functionality between Apple’s native apps / cloud experience and those that can delivered by third party apps. While it’s possible to use third party apps, there are a bunch of little quirks and inconveniences that will ultimately drive the user back towards the native apps and spending money on Apple’s cloud service.

except you can, by plugging it into a computer locally

That’s not even remotely close to being the same as the experience iCloud offers.