We already know how Apple gets rid of things that do things on iOS that they didn't want people doing: they pull them from the store.

Apple didn't do that, in fact they've left it in the store and made it free. They've given it a design award in the past (which seems to tacitly endorse that they like parts of it), and we know they've had things to help with automation in some degree on the Mac for years (AppleScript, Automator). This may be one of those cases where they just saw a really good product and decided to start from it instead of building from scratch.

Not unlike what they did with MusicMatch Jukebox and a number of other things throughout their history. (iTunes was amazing. I'm not going to argue about the last 10 years or so, but when they bought it it was really nice software for many years).