That's an entirely separate decision from deciding to control what goes into the shop and by that not really part of the discussion, isn't it? And Apple asking for a fee to allow uploading apps is also a separate issue, after all, Mozilla is doing it without a fee by using volunteers to screen apps.

Both points are true and a problem but it's distracting from what this is about, no?

These arent separate, situations do not exist in a bubble.

These are Apple taking aggressive measures toward developers. Squeezing them and potentially blocking them from perfectly legitimate apps.

They don't exist in a bubble, correct, they are however separate, but again, this is not what this is about.

It still means you can separate the good ideas that apple has from the bad ideas. Not everything Apple does is inherently bad or evil because they do some evil or bad things, no?

And this is simply extracting the good part of apple's store policy; patrolling and checking apps so that users can trust what is in the store.

I develop for iOS on a secondhand Mac mini and commodity keyboard, mouse and monitor. Total cost well under £600, let alone “multi-thousands of dollars”.

That sounds like a potential solution to me.

Still costs more than any other development. Where'd you get your's second hand?

Just eBay.

You can use qemu to run macOS. It's probably agaist ToS, but it works. But it's best to just ignore Apple if you can. It's their problem anyway, if they want to discourage cross-platform developers that don't own or have interest in their HW.