[0] As far as I know, the only system feature that requires Swift is iOS 14/macOS 11's new widgets, which must be written in SwiftUI.
Apple have had significant churn in dev tooling, languages, sdks, frameworks, chip architectures over the last couple of decades. Perhaps that is completely normal but it does mean developers are always struggling to keep up, and an app written for iOS 1.0 needs significant alterations if not a rewrite to work with later versions. Almost everything has been completely replaced, from language to frameworks to dev tooling like resources.
Java was introduced alongside Objective-C, with a common bridge to call into Objective-C runtime, as Apple was unsure if the Apple developer community would be welcoming to Objective-C.
They dropped it after the community was more than happy to adopt Objective-C.
About the same time they introduced PyObjC support and for a while there was MacRuby, which due to internal politics was eventually dropped, the creator left and now sells RubyMotion for mobile development, originally based on it.
Then if we switch back to the System days, there was Object Pascal, replaced by C++ frameworks, Hypercard, Lisp, Dylan.
The churn may not be a deliberate strategy but it is certainly very effective in locking developers in.