It's difficult to know why anyone laid out a circuit one specific way, especially without a complete schematic, layout, and a few hours to think about it. It may be that this design was the only way to fit the circuit into an already designed enclosure, or it could be that this was done for some sort of manufacturability reason, they may have also had some issue with noise and done this to shield some part of the circuit. In addition, though the design may not meet the UL standards, it might be good enough. UL standards are neither necessary nor sufficient to guarantee safety and reliability.

I find many of the OP's criticisms to be rather facile, and would prefer to see this 'counterfeit' tested to failure, with the results compared to a genuine Apple product. Armed with this comparison, we could judge whether the cost savings were achieved wisely or through foolish design.

Any reader of hardware teardowns should remember that the majority of people writing these pieces have never designed a challenging, original circuit; almost all of them are just implementing designs given to them by IC manufacturers in 'application notes'.