It's one giant fighting another. Apple wants to destroy ad revenue and shift everyone to a paid App model because Apple can get its 30%. I bet you if Apple loses control of the AppStore for anti trust reasons, they would be all for ads.
So it's hard to come to a conclusion that Apple hates ads. It's easier to say that Apple dislikes advertiser networks, since their own attempt at a generic network (iAds) failed miserably. It's not even clear to me that blocking tracking is going to kill ads as a revenue stream, all it will do is make ads more expensive because they're slightly less targeted on iOS?
Also, Apple runs their own seemingly successful ad market within the App Store app — something I'm reminded of each time I search for an app and see a competitor's app I don't want at the top of my search results, filling my screen with the new design. So it's hard to say that Apple does this for the best user experience. Showing extra popups isn't great UX. And Apple likes free apps, it makes their phone and platform more valuable, so they can charge more for the hardware knowing folks can get great apps inexpensively or free.
While I'm in favour of Apple losing its complete monopoly over App Stores and apps that compete with its own, I actually am in favour of Apple enforcing these policies on apps from its own App Store and platform. And while I would say that third-party stores could have different stances on permissions, the idea that a third-party app store could prevent a popup asking to share a phone's identifier, for example, is frankly a security bypass. The same is true if apps want to communicate with other apps without the operating system knowing.
Personally, I'd love it if Apple went a step farther and used the network layer and code signing to identify which apps actively use which trackers and tracking networks the same way they currently identify apps that use the microphone and camera. It'd be fascinating to see an operating system feature that says 50% of my network traffic in Application X was telemetry being sent to Facebook, for example.
If you had broken this paragraph out into a separate post, it might get more and highly deserved attention.
Even if Apple’s motives are somehow nefarious, Facebook is being scummy in the first place, so it’s a fair move for Apple to take advantage of that, IMO.
You nailed it. Facebook wants to confuse and distract. There's absolutely no reason why Apple's push for user permission on tracking would cause the Facebook app to become subscription-based. WTF?
It wouldn’t become unviable for Facebook because even with a smaller number of users consenting to tracking they would still have a gigantic ad market.