People don’t buy AirPods because they are locked in, they buy them because they are an absolute marvel of technology.
Apple has the market share they do because they copied the playbook of fashion marketing and applied it to technology products in a time of significant industry change. They have continued to make some innovations of course, but mainly in business strategy and marketing. Their products are never really cutting edge technology nor are they remotely the best value for the cost.
Apples takes existing but not mature technology and makes it fashionable then ties it to their ecosystem. You can't even use air-tags without fully getting into the Apple system.
That's a matter of opinion. The times I have actually tried the good value competitors options that are supposedly just as good at half the price, it's not a good experience at all. Most competitors put everything it to a couple of specs that look good on a comparison sheet while neglecting the complete experience. Yeah the obscure android phone might have a 4k display and more ram at a lower price, but they only give 1 year of updates and the ROM is full of bugs and malware.
Having gone through a lot of laptops from a lot of OEMs, the current M series macbooks are the only ones which have actually seemed close to flawless. The value you get is incredible.
So it put the AirPods on a level playing field with everyone else, we would have to cripple them because they would have to exist in the same low trust environment. Is this actually better for consumers?
I certainly don’t want my 3rd party Bluetooth headphones to be loading their own kernel modules.