Its not about whats a better experience for the user its about what gives apple more money and control. Apple gets to pick which apps make it on to the app store and they take a huge cut of all sales on apps.
It's not like these things are cheap, and plenty of developers wouldn't have a shot of successfully delivering an app without the infrastructure in place to support them.
It should come as a surprise to absolutely nobody that the vendor wants their cut.
If we are having an honest conversation about who gets a cut of what, we have to realise that web apps still have bills to pay and people getting their cut of something — credit card handlers, payments systems, web hosting (and that ain't cheap, especially when demand rises) on top of the cost of hosting an API and databases, and plenty of other costs.
That's what people are asking for. If you want to provide services, sure, charge for them, but also allow developers to not use your services in this case.
Apples monopoly enforcement in both this and in html rendering is one of the biggest causes of stagnation in tech right now.
When I run a web app, sure, I need to pay lots of different middle men. But I get to choose which ones I use.
Nobody thinks it cost nothing, it's the draconian 30% they object to. Other app stores are offering similar services, with a much lower cut:
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/announcing-the-epic-...
There are ~1400 app releases in App Store per day (all of them need to be reviewed, checked for compatibility etc. etc.).
There are ~2 million apps which have to be hosted, checked, delivered etc.
Then there are push notifications. During WWDC'12 (yes, 7 years ago) Apple was pushing 7 billion notifications daily.
In comparison: Epic store has 4 apps.