While I don't mind the battery situation outside of the legislative issue, I do disagree on your claim that they're "better" in some way (but again, irrelevant to the original criticism).
Here's an anecdote to elaborate on why, since you asked:
I've had a few iPhones, varying degrees of battery quality, fairly well taken care of. I've also had a few other phones of various manufacturers and operating systems, mostly with replaceable batteries.
The ones with replaceable batteries had equivalent-to-better battery life than the iPhones I've had, including before replacing the battery, and especially after the battery on the iPhones had worn down a bit. Without iOS's battery management that throttles performance to save battery life, I've had iPhones that at 87% of max capacity (I just checked the one I'm currently using; it was probably higher when I tested this a few weeks ago) that can't outlast an HTC phone from eleven years ago that I've replaced the battery on a single time, when doing comparable tasks, and that's not even getting into the modern devices I have that beat both of them by a decent margin. This includes both with the screen on and the screen off.
Apple's battery life comes from software band-aids, not some magical benefit of soldering on batteries. Soldering just serves to make the device thinner, which is of dubious benefit.
Agreed. Considering that getting an iPhone battery replaced directly by Apple costs about $49-$69 overall (as others have mentioned in the thread already), they almost definitely are not making bank off it.
I'm pretty sure Apple isn't making gigantic bank off battery upgrades.
To be candid: I don't much care about "Right To Repair". I'm not animated by most nerd policy priorities, like "Net Neutrality" or "Copyright Reform" or whatever. Those aren't my political priorities and they're not the concerns Pinboard is surfacing when he talks about Microsoft and Google donations.