Well now I've seen everything. Any one else check on hell has it frozen over?
Unless I missed something, there is no talk of lowering the price by the cost of labor for, e.g., a $270 screen replacement. So my assumption is that you get to do an amateur screen replacement for the same price while also assuming the risk and liability of messing something up.
I even wonder if this is a kind of counter-punch against the right to repair movement so Apple, et al., can claim, "see, we allow repairs"; while it really just serves to take the wind out of the sails of the right to repair movement in the halls of Congress and the bureaucratic demons in DC.
It's also completely possible that the reason they're selling complete assemblies instead of individual ICs is because a) even they don't replace individual ICs, because it's fiddly, more likely to cause further problems, and requires keeping a stock of a lot of different individual chips, and b) they genuinely believe that there's not enough people who would be able to do that replacement (regardless of willingness) for it to be worthwhile.
Personally? I think it's some of both.
This is not something that Apple decided in a vacuum or even as it relates to the USA. Apple is surely looking at this with the lessons it has learned as it relates to how the EU has been behaving and its motivations too.
Not to belittle anyone, but the upper echelons of Apple and their servant army of attorneys operate from Mt Olympus and have a far wider aperture than most of us mere mortals have, regardless of how broadly we believe we understand a relatively narrow focus like how this relates to goings on in the USA alone.
We know Apple very well now, they'll be expensive af and will give them a reason to keep screwing over third party parts by introducing hardware locks.