This has gotta be cus of pressure from EU? Like if they didnt make them more repairable it might be illegal to sell them here soon.
Apple is greedy not stupid. They don't want third party app stores because it would cause competition and interfere with their almost entirely vertically integrated consumer milking machine... they don't care about malware, they care about control, controlling the user, to make sure they spend as much money as possible with Apple.
Notice that they have been increasingly swapping out as much third party as possible so they can take all of the profit, they "produce" film and tv shows and sell those tv shows on a device they make with a payment processing method they own... lots of layers of profit, it goes well beyond monopoly, they are destroying the concept of a free market. They do similar things with hardware and tech, buying out or forcing businesses into positions where they have to sell to Apple out or get pushed out.
No, your reasoning is nonsensical, you can defend anything with that argument. If you apply it to the rest of the world then no one can do evil because you can never know someone's true motivations... at a certain point you have to draw conclusions from actions, and it's pretty hard to see Apple's actions as not intending to maximise wealth extraction at this point, sure "tech" stuff still happens there out of some necessity and momentum, but the people at the helm clearly have a singular goal.
If your argument is merely that strong inference is flawed, then you are in for a lot of disappointment with reality in general, since 99.9% of what everyone does every day is based upon it out of necessity.
Took a few years and a few hundred millions difficult to repair devices to get there.