We sure did. We're also ignoring all the celebrities that helped to push the Apple brand (remember the iPod and it's terrible but iconic white headphones?).
Popular culture has a much stronger influence on Apple's standing with non-nerds, than nerds do. We like to think we're important, and that people value our opinions, but increasingly that's not true. as the differences between the options diminish to 'probably bad for the world long term' (big tech) and 'probably bad for you today' (open source / pinephone / etc, they're just not usable enough yet), the value of our opinions drops, because there's no real choice between bad or badder.
They remind me every time I bring up stuff like this that I was the one who pushed them to use Apple. In retrospect I wish I had taken FOSS more seriously.
"We" are the people that support, recommend and install this stuff. Hardware just has longer life cycles.
They rather push devices like librem 5, Pine phone, Fairphone with /e/os, but not Apple...
As the parent commenter noted, Apple was really one of the only reasonable recommendations from privacy-oriented nerdy guys to their friends and family, if they didn't want to go the out-of-touch-with-reality route by recommending the phones you listed.
I think you oversimplify this by a lot. No, Apple reputation won't be severely damaged by this move immediately. But I do believe that those "nerdy guys" did a lot to push the Apple brand, and a big part of that push was due to security and privacy. Until recently Apple was always the "privacy brand" and it was hard to argue against it without going the full FSF route of argumentation.
This is no longer the case and I'm sure this will deal some damage over time, even if it only starts with the "screeching voices" of the (nerdy) minority. Maybe not directly to their revenue, but certainly to their reputation. Nothing wrong with shaving off a bit of the prestige of working at Apple ;)
> I don't want to be that guy, but for this job there were lining up 300 more people.
This is the case for many jobs that don't come close to the holy "working at Apple".