Comment by woodruffw

Nobody's balking at it. Apple and Google both dedicate significant engineering efforts towards making these kinds of exploit chains even more expensive and unreliable. See for example Lockdown Mode in iOS 16.

The point is this: good security means being able to intelligibly state your threat model and respond to its specific capabilities. Failing to do this results in all kinds of muddied thinking, making it harder to defend against more quotidian adversaries. If your threat model genuinely involves the US IC, then turning on Lockdown Mode is about the best you can do short of throwing your phone in the ocean. By all appearances, that would have prevented this chain.