For what it's worth, all the famous either unlocking or remote hacking sagas (like Pegasus) have mostly been around iPhones. Which either indicates that Androids are so trivially hacked that nobody is even talking about it (sounds a bit doubtful, IMO, hopefully), or that the majority of "targets" have been using iPhones. It has certainly been the case with all the hacked journalists I remember.

Also the Android landscape is much more fragmented, so maybe a vanilla Android exploit might not work on MIUI, so hackers don't bother when it's "easier" to develop for iOS, which has the majority of juicy targets anyways?

I suspect pressure to backdoor something or similar requests in the US are often (not always) one off adventures that collectively look like something larger, rather than say a policy where someone goes to companies and make general requests continuously like some regulator going about his business.

The effect may end up being widespread, but the actual access and details are more uneven / look strange to us because of how spotty it is at times.

At least in the us I suspect that law enforcement, the typical surveillance organizations may even try to cast a wide net at times, but I think they're more transactional in their intent / look for what they need for a given person, people, case and less so to keep an eye on where a random citizen comes and goes.

That's not a justification for any of it, but I think it might explain why folks don't always find the 1984 they're looking for / expect in the end result.

That actually sounds plausible. It’s a pretty simple explanation that would explain all the issues in the post.