I think their point is that the App Store review process is random and arbitrary.

Which is not to say that "Report a Scam or Fraud" is a bad policy.

App Store review can be random, AND this can be a good policy. (Well, good for consumers. I could see it causing developers some issues if competitors weaponize it.)

I, for one, like the f-droid model or you could say any sane package manager model.

When I download a package from f-droid repository, I know the folks at f-droid have the source code of the bits I downloaded. Same thing with Debian and Fedora. Why can't Apple do the same thing? Require developers to submit machine-readable source code along with build instructions. Build them directly on Apple servers. Sign them with Apple's certificates.

I am not an Apple developer. As a consumer, I would welcome such a change.

Now, it is true that you could have a web view that fetches application chrome/content from a web server but I would argue Apple should disallow such apps anyway.

While that might be a great idea, Apple is a competitor of many of the companies in the App Store. I'm not sure how they'd feel about their largest competitor having access to their absolutely-valuable-and-secret source code.

They could require it be stored with a reputable escrow company.

Huh, what's the value in the review process then..?

To limit competition.