Apple has been known for doing a whole bunch of R&D which affects the industry. Hell, they were heavily involved in USB-C, and got no competitive advantage from that R&D spending – they just got the opportunity to make better products. Same with WebGPU and other web standards (and, well, there's the freely available WebKit!).

"Companies won't invest R&D into making freely available standards because if it's freely available it's not a competitive advantage" is clearly not something which bears out in the real world.