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> the goal is simply universal interoperability

No, the goal is that "GNU Emacs should never offer people a practical reason to use some other system instead of GNU".

Universal interoperability is just a side effect.

You've got it backwards. Stallman may be disagreeable at times, but he's no fool. It's written this way to address the root cause of interop issues, which are themselves a secondary effect.

Of course he wants people to choose GNU, but most importantly, he wants to preserve people's freedom to choose GNU, which means it must not become a second-class citizen to proprietory additions from Apple, Microsoft, or anyone else. If it's portable to GNU, the issue goes away. He says so explicitly.

And nobody will pick the GNU solution when the non-GNU solution works better regardless of the OS

Though under this wording emacs would theoretically accept a GNU OS-only feature. It just happens that GNU OSes rarely offer extra features that emacs can take advantage of.

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