Otherwise, only the UID can be detected. The real mystery is why Apple refuses to open the low-level read commands. (To read NDEF, or determine that the data is _not_ NDEF, you need to read the card.)
ISO 14443 card reader functionality has been made available some iOS versions before, but it's still restricted (e.g. you can't select any "payment" ISO 7816 applications, you have to predefine the list of AIDs you want to be able to select, and you don't have lower layer access to ISO 14443).
I'm not aware of any announcements to further open up "reader" mode.
- The EEA-only HCE (which lets you emulate the card in your app in software, for a limited list of use cases, which makes it a non-starter for fully offline systems unfortunately, as there's no protection against exfiltrating any keys from the app), and
- The some-non-EEA-countries-only "full smartcard access" solution, which requires you to pay Apple and do a ton of (presumably also very expensive) certification.
So for different reasons, neither is something in scope for hobbyists at the moment, unfortunately.
MIFARE Classic uses a mandatory, proprietary (presumably still patented) encryption algorithm even for "world-readable" cards, on top of the ISO 14443-3 standard. I'm not even sure whether Apple could legally offer that capability without licensing it from NXP.
On Android, only devices with an NXP chip support these tags for the same reason.
You could argue that Apple could just provide even lower layer access to the contactless interface to allow apps to implement it in software, but I'm not sure if that's feasible (due to timing constraints).
(Note that the article doesn't specify which MIFARE tags it is about. If it's MIFARE Classic, something must have changed, and maybe Apple has licensed the required NXP patents? DESfire should work with iOS without jumping through any hoops, since that implementation is ISO 14443 compliant all the way up to -4.)
Those terms are in turn set by the partners that asked for these technologies to be developed in the first place. And so any development gets slowed to a crawl in this space.
Back in 2015 I was tech lead for a modern (web based) SaaS library management system and getting it to work with RFID tags with a wrapper application was all sorts of fun and games.
We got RFID library tags working on Android, but with iOS locking down NFC access it turned out to be impossible and we had to get libraries to buy bluetooth connected RFID scanners.