I strongly disagree. The browser engine is hugely important. It took Apple years and years to implement features like WebGL and WebRTC, those simply cannot be grafted onto an existing engine by a wrapper app. Without any meaningful competition Apple were happy to sit on those features and implement at their own leisure. That isn't real competition.

Another example: earlier this year it was revealed that Safari had a huge security hole in its IndexedDB implementation:

https://safarileaks.com

There's absolutely nothing that a web browser maker could do about it. They fall victim to the exact same bugs that Safari does because they have to way to avoid it. Again, not real competition. They also broke localStorage in iOS 14.1 and took three months to fix it. Because there's nothing forcing their hand.

> The reasons for this are technical, not arbitrary or business related.

Oh my sweet summer child. Apple has many business incentives to push native solutions over web-based ones. We'll never know exactly what motivates them or why but to totally dismiss any business incentives at work here seems naive.