There has to be some incentive somewhere for Apple to do this. They know it's wrong, they know it will be abused. Tim Cook himself, if he wasn't rich and powerful, would be executed in a number of countries that Apple operates in for his sexual/romantic identity.
Apple also removes LGBT based applications in countries where they're illigal, to continue doing business. This demonstrates that Apple complies with the demands of foreign governments, that they value money over anything else.
So Apple, a company that complies with governments committing human rights violations (Including the U.S), forces everyone to have an image scanner that looks through their private images and documents to find content Apple has deemed objectionable, with the sources of that content supposedly being from these governments.
FBI: Hey apple, here's some new hashes for images that are bad, let us know who has them. You just have to trust us, no way that we would ever put political imagery critical of the government in that database. But you can't prove it even if we did.
Remember, this is the FBI that flaunts federal court orders, breaks the law, and no one is ever held accountable.
https://youtu.be/oy3623YRsMk
My suspicion is that the FBI finally had enough of Apple not complying with their encryption standards and have done some work behind the scenes to make various individuals at Apple's lives difficult. So they're implementing this to appease the feds.
There was a thread on HN here not too long ago with the FBI stalking and threatening pentesters that wouldn't join them. No doubt they're doing the same to big companies that are making their "jobs" harder.