GP's point was that when Apple forces accessory makers to come to them for a license, they can arbitrarily chose to deny a license according to their whim. Apple (like many other companies, to be fair) uses product announcements as a way to force a positive press coverage bubble during product launches since only people who generally write nice things about them are given the products to review. It would be easy to see how Apple will 'delay' licensing of companies that don't play ball and produce accessories compatible with the new phones.

>What possible conceivable benefit could there be for them to sneakily try and add it back now?

They have always been pro DRM. For e.g. They force you to be on a constant iOS update treadmill, where they have made it impossible to downgrade iOS, and almost impossible to avoid updating it with the constantly popups to update.