[olliej]

If you lose your phone (and all other devices you might have), apple does have a secure (as in apple cannot access it) last ditch recovery path (see my other wall of text/word soup answer).

But in the absence of that the data is gone - it's one of the big concerns that come up in response to "E2E everything": people are not used to the idea that forgetting your password (or losing devices in a 2fa world) means the data is actually irrecoverable and it's not just a matter of reseting the account password (e.g. you can't go into a store with your ID to "prove it's you" because that isn't the problem)