Apple is a trillion dollar business and will find novel ways of either burying the feature or whitewashing it as something we all need. I imagine if they do e2e encryption of your photos they can spin this as being a necessary feature "to keep you and your family safe".
I doubt they have any worries about tech news being critical of their policy. People will generally trade privacy for safety, I've seen this as a constant theme since 9/11. There is a lot of apathy around who has your data these days. I talk about it with friends and more often than not the attitude is "well, google/facebook already know everything about me, doesn't matter anymore".
The real question is whether they can keep their pro-privacy image intact with this change.
Also, if they don't then does it even matter at this point?
It's possible that even if Apple dropped all pretense and started working with authoritarian governments to compromise reporters the general public in the west still wouldn't care.
Apple likely did market research before they chose their ads and decided that privacy was of mass interest.