Not completely, but maybe enough to lower the insane fees?

For instance, why not charge for the services used and a low payment processing fee? If developers bring associated costs, they should pay for it. It just seems 30% is overshooting quite a bit. They want to treat developers like regular customers with regular margins, when they are more like partners bringing them nearly free revenue.

I guess I'm too ignorant to understand how building, maintaining and securing the App Store is 10x more expensive than doing the same for something like Mastercard.

I was responding to comments about a particular pricing model, not defending Apple.

Perhaps I should find a better way to communicate that - making it literally the first words of my post didn't work.

All of those are recurring fees.

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. The developer program has a yearly fee. Phones, even in the rare case that they are used for their full lifespan, still need to be replaced as they slowly die/become obselete - in practice every 2-5 years.