On iOS this means you can't get notifications. Notifications are really important.

Apple won't do web notifications because it means then people wouldn't have to pay their 10x-over-the-industry-standard premium (30% instead of 3%) for bundled credit card processing if they buy stuff on the web and not via the App Store.

This seems to have changed. Web push is coming to mobile Safari next year. https://webkit.org/blog/12945/meet-web-push/ (Edit: better link - „Keep an eye out for Web Push on iOS and iPadOS in 2023.“)

The notifications all go through Apple still, which allows them to monitor and censor them.

This is not much of an improvement. :(

Whatever the web push standard lacks for encryption or hiding data can be done by your app.

The Web Push Standard supports e2e encryption for messages sent from your app to the device:

https://web.dev/push-notifications-web-push-protocol/#the-pa...