Downloading photos from icloud to a PC

Is there a simple way to do this without losing all the metadata and the original file date? I have about 17500 photos up in iCloud, and downloading them has been a real nightmare.

• Just going into icloud.com. signing in and looking for (say) all the photos from 2021 is impossible. There's a slider at the RHS of the screen which gives approximate dates ('May', or 'May 16 to July 3') which seem to be pretty random - and there's no way to clikc over into a list format which file dates; I ended up just going for the rough dates and selecting as near as possible a month at a time;
• Oh, and if you select say 1200 photos, you're out of luck - start the download and you get a message saying 1k is the limit. Now try and reproduce your selection;
• 'Download' - well, not quite. The files come down in a zip folder, and after you've done all the extracting, now you find the files have been stripped of their metadata, so now you can't even sort them on the tags. If you search around you'll find that a randon selection of .HEIC or .PNG files allow you to look at EXIF data if you use Irfan or a tag app. Search again and you'll find helpful suggestions that you should export in png or whatever, but there are no options for that. I foind about 1 in 5 downloads keep the exif data. Outstanding!
• So after about a day and a half of fiddling with this and that, I now have a magnificent archive of detailed and well structured uploads, downloaded into a massive and barely sortable heap of images. It's as if Apple would prefer to keep my images for their purposes, eh?
• Oh, and 30 minutes of download time in, up pops a truly bizarre message: [In red] Warning! The file you are downloading has a virus, you should stop the download, delete the file and try to download from a more secure source.' There's no way to find which file - only option is stop or go; the files are being downloaded from secure iCloud, and there's no copy anywhere else ican 'download' from; and when I waste an hour breaking the download into smaller chunks, well fiddlededee, no virus warnings. Half a dozen more of these little random trip wires as I finally (just now) get the last unsorted group back out the iCloud grip.

This is the worst I've encountered from Apple since all the fun with iTunes a decade ago. Why could it not be File Goes UP: wait a bit: Same file comes DOWN. ?