With yourself and a coincidental comment making such reasonable corrections I investigated further.
Posted below for posterity, not necessarily you.
The reddit post that started it all: https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/7inu45/psa_iphone_s...
Finally, from the horses mouth:https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387
"iOS 11.3 and later improve this performance management feature"
and
"iPhone 8 and later use a more advanced hardware and software ..[snip].. As a result, the impacts of performance management may be less noticeable on iPhone 8 and later."
My conclusion: It is true that Apple was only targeting phones with dodgy(to a degree of approximation) batteries.
OTOH, Apple does a better job now. Both in execution and communication.
Whether Apple would have reached this achievement without batterygate is unknowable.
My apologies for spreading misinformation, thank you for your patience.
There is plenty of things to be critical of Apple and any corporation for and you don't need to spread misinformation in order to do so. You can even be critical about how they approached this, but your original claim that you doubled down on is simply false.
[1] https://twitter.com/_inside/status/942817814531969024