I think apple did win, and the author is manufacturing outrage. Apple loaned him a professional setup to repair his phone. That is completely in line with the Apple customer experience, and gives insight into why they resisted home repair so long.

Apple doesn’t take shortcuts on their hardware. They have a design/experience expectation. Flimsy tools, eyeballing alignment, cheap 3rd party replacement parts. These are all things that significantly increase the likely of degraded quality/experience after a layperson’s self repair.

I think there’s a healthy medium somewhere, but for now, apple expects home repair to done at the same level of service they would do. I’d rather error on the side of quality and robustness myself.