Imho there's a reasonable case that they did the thing which best protected users older devices and daily usable time, and I think most users would prefer their phone stays working for a day on a single charge, so they can make and receive calls and messages towards the end of the day.
It's possible Apple wasn't thinking of the users, but it's not a clear cut case.
It's also possible that if Apple hadn't slowed the older phones down as batteries wore out, they would have seen more sales as users needed to replace their phones more urgently as battery life dropped. So it's not obvious that the action they took favoured sales anyway.
Court cases are rarely won, especially with big companies. They have the money to drag them out so most are just settled. So in my eyes any class action lawsuit a company settles for millions is a case they lost.
When will you admit that it was a clear case? They just admitted it themselves by settling!
I give up :-)
This is the same company that removed the headphone jack for very cynical reasons, in order to increase the sale price of their phone by $150 (or however much the Airpods cost). The same company that repeatedly removed ports from the laptops in order to sell more dongles (so much so that there were running gags at the time about Apple, the dongle company). A company where the revenue from the sale of accessories for their devices could literally make a Fortune 1000 company (!!!).
They definitely knew what they were doing and chose to do the thing that most benefited their bottom line.
Let's stop giving the benefit of the doubt to the top tech companies. They don't deserve it like mom and pop stores.
Oblio's Law: Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity, unless the ones acting have an army of data scientists, researchers, market analysts and PR people at their disposal.