I certainly understand why developers would prefer that Apple have that business model, but that's not the one they chose for the iPhone. And these laws don't prohibit it.

Yes it was, they later changed their stance. In the announcement for iPhone, Jobs on stage explicitly stated that all you need to develop an app was html and modern javascript with API's into the phone hardware. And they would basically just be a PWA that would keep the app updated automatically as soon as the developer makes a change, all while keeping the iPhone "reliable and secure." In fact, he was bragging about not having a store "rather than having to go through this complex update process" as a dig at the Google play store.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvQ9JNm_qWc

And then everyone realized web apps sucked and demanded that Apple release an SDK, which they did, and the rest is history.

Early phones ran on incredibly limited hardware and genuinely needed native applications just to do simple things.

We've had 15 years of hardware and browser optimization, Moore's law, and development when it comes to mobile hardware.

Web apps run just fine now. Hell, many native apps are just web apps via things React Native or webviews.

That's incorrect. Enforcement has failed to handle it, but Apple's app store model is a violation of antitrust law, in the US, the EU, and elsewhere. Many of the actions you are seeing in the news about it are regulatory mandates, based on the fact that Apple's business model isn't legal.