Yes, what you said is that ridiculous.

If you want to get an opinion from the US Federal Government on how to account for a transaction for tax purposes there is in fact a procedure for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_letter_ruling

One in the business of importing phones from another country who has questions about competing taxation and tariff rules has many options for getting guidance on the implications of their accounting.

And nothing that happened in this matter was shocking or surprising to Apple. They have elaborate tax avoidance schemes. For example, they didn't like trip and fall and land on a convoluted Double Irish arrangement by accident: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

It depends who do you mean with everyone? In this case the only party which should have been asked would have been the EU, which doesn't sound mad at all in my opinion.