I didn't mean to imply it was Apple's fault Windows did not run on M1 (in fact it has been shown that Windows ARM64 does run natively on M1 albeit through a patched QEMU due to lack of driver support), but by designing a custom SoC they have abandoned the approach which would afford them the most compatibility (staying with x86). This may have been the right direction for them, but it's not the same approach as before and definitely abandons compatibility in favor of better performance.

Second while Gatekeeper has been around for 8+ years, the default of contacting an Apple server on every program launch was new (or so I thought) with Big Sur. It's a step towards that direction. People could not launch apps when this server was down.