You still need to pay the $100/yr to get the app out to anyone else's iPhone using TestFlight or an enterprise app store. You can build and test on your own iPhone (or an emulator) for free but that's the limit.

But that's exactly the type of thing why iOS apps tend to be of higher quality than Android apps. The whole "I do the bare minimum to support your platform" thing isn't going well with iOS users.

So the question is why would I as a consumer want to buy a least common denominator app using a cross platform framework that wasn’t actually tested on real hardware?

You can always uninstall it if it's crap right? It would be available to you as a choice, and now it's simply not available.

If the App Store becomes full of “checkbox ports” it’s going to be even more difficult to navigate than it already is.

Part of that is on Apple for not investing more in discovery, but copious numbers of low effort ports isn’t a good thing to have anyway. In the game world, bad ports of console games to PC and bad ports of games from any other platform to the Switch are one of the most consistent gripes — quite often the sentiment surrounding them is that they’d be better off not existing.

The app store has been full of "checkbox ports" since about 6 months after it launched

You're showing your cards as an android person ;-)

I agree with you, but nearly everyone on apple products will not. I get a (too me very perplexing) very similar respose when I ask things like, "why would it hurt people who want an Apple curated app store experience to allow a buried setting in the settings menu that allows sideloading for the few people who want that?"