That's the ultimate victory for Steve Jobs. His thoughts were so impactful, they killed Flash and made his thoughts not needed anymore.
I’m completely certain that there is some completely harmless explanation to this and I wouldn’t read anything at all into this (except that this post is very old and not a part of their website where they pay excessive attention as to whether old stuff is still up).
You make the bold assumption managers are aware of the Streisand effect when they're about to trigger it. So far reality has shown even management in IT companies falls for this every time.
Apple is the origin of the modern mobile web. And you can publish a web app on the App Store if you want, and many do that. The rest is very much a matter of philosophy and design that goes well beyond "Apple wants to push the App Store".
The reason why Thoughts on Flash was removed is that... Flash literally doesn't exist anymore. It's not like the text is not preserved historically all over the web. I have a PDF of it even somewhere on my drive.
Please explain how that alone is a reason to make the richest corporation on the planet go through their whole online presence and remove a few kB of redundant text.
Nobody does that just because it's not needed anymore, it's more expensive to pay an employee for deleting this than just keeping it up for another decade. It's very obvious Apple wants to hide the fact Steve Jobs would disagree with their current way of doing things and fell for the Streisand effect as everyone does.
I agree that this was a deliberate political move from Apple, but I call survivorship bias on the 'everyone falls for the Streisand effect'. Consider that you only hear about the ones the do get caught.
Yes you're right. Only small companies can delete a page.
What even is this sentence, it makes no sense.
So, delete them?