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Look, I totally get WHY apple chose this file format, I said as much in my original post. My mental frustration here is that there's a simple solution to the problem, yet apple's greed (and let's be honest, that's all it is) prevents that solution from being implemented.

You're saying "let's be honest" but I totally disagree this has anything to do with Apple's greed. Your reasoning doesn't make sense to me. You said it was so they can exclude SD card slots and force people onto iCloud storage more easily, but they're incentivized to stick to JPEG in that situation so they can sell more storage. Besides, HEIF was introduced in iOS 11 in 2017 long after iCloud was already being pushed.

I don't ever put it past Apple to do greedy shite but not every decision is rooted in greed, everyone began switching into HEVC/H.265 video around that same time, it entirely makes sense to use HEIF which is just HEVC for images. and wouldn't you know it, Apple also introduced 8-bit and 10-bit HEVC video decoding in iOS 11 too, so that explains that.

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For the record it's a 2.4 ghz machine with 16 mb or ram and 4 cores.

This doesn't tell me much... intel had quad core CPUs at 2.4GHz 15 years ago. But realistically, it's just an image file, your computer at 3 years old shouldn't have a problem opening an image file. Anyone playing an extremely common HEVC/H.265 video file is using essentially the same algorithm but at 24+ frames per second as opposed to your single image. A variety of phones from a variety of brands works with the format no problem. I don't doubt something is working screwy for you and that sucks but it's got little to do with Apple users or Apple picking a less common but still standard file format with objectively superior compression, capabilities, and decoding at scale.