“We pay for the right to read our old messages in a few ways: precious space on our 64GB iPhones (the base level storage amount for iPhones), our Macs, and our iCloud storage, which Apple charges us for each month.”
Apple stores every message you have ever sent and bills you for the iCloud space. Then it gives you no way to reach them except scrolling. His wife scrolled for 45 minutes and the app crashed short of the goal. Search misses old messages entirely. Apple sells the storage and skips the feature that would make it worth paying for.