Once the device has been sold to you (for a profit, even!), Apple has no business interfering in relationships between you and a separate business trying to sell you additional software for it, much less to collect a tax on entirely unrelated things like streaming video subscriptions.
If you really believe that "once a device has been sold to you, the manufacturer has no business interfering in relationships between you and a separate business trying to sell you additional software for it", then you'd want to apply that principle to gaming consoles, to car infotainment systems, etc.
But no, the EU legislation basically restricts their coverage to only the largest companies (which are incidentally not EU companies). It's not based on principles, but on opportunistically targeting the companies that can afford to pay and can't afford to lose the EU market.
If they want access to EU citizens, then they have to play by the EU's rules, otherwise they can get bent and say goodbye to that whole market.
This is the worst approach, I think. Lawmaking shouldn't work where a juicy fineable target is spotted, singled out, and milked for all it's worth. Laws should set out rules that everyone has to follow.
Also, it might be hard to order groceries on a PS5, but it's much simpler to make a PS5 able to browse the Web than it is to open up an iPhone to any HTML-rendering code, or background tasks, without compromising the seamless experience reasons many people bought one for in the first place.
> due to a runaway capitalistic empire trying to add an additional tax to everything that vaguely gets near it
It's not due to a runaway capitalistic empire. It's because it made stuff people really want, so they'll pay for it. You're thinking of political structures, where people are forced to pay taxes regardless of the outcomes. Apple are rich because they make things people want. That's not a runaway empire. That's just being really, really useful. This gross mischaracterisation of useful structures as empires is astonishing and unhelpful to any clarity of thought.