In the Jobs years it was because the person at the tob intrinsically gave a shit about making a good thing.

But you're right, it certainly seems that's the kind of game Cook is playing. Better than Windows, but no better, and keep the extra money.

It's a winning business strategy, especially when you have legions of die-hard customers who won't leave you. Microsoft has a similar situation (though many probably won't leave MS for different reasons), so it's in their business interest to increase profits by subjugating their customers with annoying ads baked into the OS. What do they have to lose? It's not like Apple's/MS's customers are going to switch to Linux (which has its own problems of course).

To be fair to Apple, it does sound like this is a somewhat rare bug (only seen in high-load situations?). It's not as bad, I think, as ads in the OS. So, as you say, Apple just needs to be a little better than MS and that's good enough.

Except apple does also put ads in their os. And you can't even permanently disable them, the iCloud nagware comes back every once in a while trying to sell me overpriced storage.

Is it saying your storage is full or why is it nagging you?

It's nagging me because I don't use iCloud.

This bug dates back to Job's tenure. Apple products were not without bugs from 97-01. In fact, they had a lot of them.

The CEO doesn’t control the fix rate of audio bugs. There’s a few layers of management between those two things.

While it is annoying, I've got much better audio performance and less hassle from macOS than with Linux or Windows, even with bugs. There were a few audio bugs that annoyed me in the '2020 videoconferencing season', but most were solved. I've noticed the L/R volume bug then, but not in the last few years and my perception was it was fixed. So, even if it's buggy it might not be buggy for everyone.