Could they have been baiting it out of Apple on purpose?

Yes, almost definitely that is what happened here. IANAL but typically you can't sue someone saying, if I did X then they would do Y and Y would hurt me. You have to actually say that they hurt you. Epic wanted to challenge Apple's App Store rules in court, and this is how they decided to do it. Push an update to the app, making it very clear that this update would help consumers with lower prices because American antitrust law focuses on keeping prices low, wait for Apple to take them down, then sue.

They would certainly have been happier with an outcome where apple left their app up and accepted the change. But they knew that was not in the cards because they almost certainly talked with apple about this beforehand. There is no chance that this was not discussed between executives at both companies. 100% there were meetings. 100% at some point epic informed apple that they were going to make the change, and of what would happen if apple banned them. There was no baiting involved.

Yes they brilliantly baited Apple into crushing Epic in court.

On what evidence to you base your belief that Apple is guaranteed to win this case? Yes, they have more financial resources, and they have a lot more to lose if they lose so they definitely fight as hard as they can. That doesn't mean they aren't breaking the law and that Epic can't prove it. It'll just be very expensive to do so.

They aren’t breaking the law in any way.

Apple currently has at least two antitrust investigations underway, and this seems to add fuel to that fire.

Whether or not they are breaking the law, they are about to have every single aspect of their market behaviour put under the microscope.

They don't need to break a law to be found to be operating anti-competitively.

They don’t have to break a law to be found guilty? How Kafkaesque.

I guess that's that then.

I'll let Epic Games know, so that they can drop the suit and save themselves some vbucks.

That's the position of one of the two parties in the case. The other party says they are.

Epic failure?